Once or twice a month!

A basketful of magazines.

They've gone to two places: to the recycling bin and to the "bookstore" at the public library, where they'll be sold for a dime apiece.

It used to be very, very hard for me to give up my old magazines. My collection included ten years of Gourmet, and many issues of Martha Stewart Living - each of them full of wonderful ideas. . . clever and beautiful, refined and lovely. No wonder they held such appeal to me, especially during the years when my kids were little and unpredictable and so dependent.

I suppose that those magazines were my alter ego, the me that used to be, and the me that I wanted to be (in my spare time, I guess). But I gave them away to recycling and to anyone who would take them.

And now I find that it's not so hard to do that with the magazines that show up in my mailbox every month. . . out they must go, after a couple weeks. More will be coming!

Even if practice doesn't make perfect, it does seem to loosen up old habits and help cement new ones, and I'm pretty proud of how I'm learning to let go of magazines. If there's something really, really compelling, I clip it and put it in a pile. . . that pile will be a toss, no doubt, on another day - wow!

And maybe one day I might even let some subscriptions lapse, and see if it's not the end of the world - my fantasy world, that is!

xo, LD