Do you have a tendency to hold to things? I’m not talking about the hoarders who get profiled on Reality TV because they have old magazines stuffed in their ovens or clothes piled so high, they can’t find their beds.

I’m referring to the more socially acceptable form of hoarding where you hold on to your favourite boots even if you can’t wear them without seeing your socks through the bottom. Or when you stay in a job you should have moved on from two years ago because the fear of change (or the zeros in your paycheck) keep you groaning every Monday about how this is the week you will update your resume. Or maybe…your history might have a thing or two in common with mine and you have held on to people or emotions in the same way a cartoon figure wraps himself around a tree in the middle of a 150km/hr hurricane.

On my flight home from Calgary last weekend, a Martha Beck article caught my eye and I’m still rolling her words through my mind:

“When we try to force a defunct relationship to continue or stay in a job after we’ve outgrown it, it invariably turns hateful. Denying an organic end point is like trying to animate a corpse.” (more…)