The Red Couch
A bunch of years back I wanted a red couch. I started looking on craigslist and at local yard sales but nothing looked even remotely nice. I regularly buy furniture for my rental cabins since they get worn out quickly but I never buy actually new things. It is generally gently used and still looking great. Well the red couch was supposed to be for my own cabin, the one I actually live in. It was all inspired by my friend Sarah since she has those fabulously comfortable and gorgeous red couches, that I admired every time I saw them!
My wanting grew into a full-fledged obsession!
I started to look online at furniture stores and the amount I was willing to pay was slowly creeping up. It took up hours a day and became the most important issue in my life. All my friends know that I don’t buy things new, and when they get rid of stuff they no longer like, I am the first one they ask whether I am interested in it. And I mean anything from boots to kitchens to lumber to a BBQ grill I will probably want it!
Karen a wonderful friend of mine got involved since I would see her a few times a week and she was game driving to Burlington with me and her truck to buy the priced new couch. Every furniture store had many red couches but none seemed good enough anymore. Karen kept saying that she had never seen my like this and she didn’t even recognize me anymore but here I was fretting over the smallest little detail. I wasn’t willing to fork out close to a $1000 for just any old sofa, oh no, it had to be PERFECT! The right fabric, the extra wide seating depth so I could snuggle with my non-existing boyfriend on it at night, had to be extra long so somebody could also sleep on it and most importantly it had to be the right kind of RED!!!
I was just about ready to commit to one when I realized that I was going nuts! A couch isn’t that important, it is actually not important at all. No thing is important! In that moment I saw that I had lost my way that I no longer cared about the inside, but way too much about the outside. I am not saying that people shouldn’t have nice things that they enjoy having but when it starts to be more important then anything else, spending time with people you love or being in nature, whatever floats your boat, than we are lost!
Unfortunately this is what happens way too many times nowadays that people spend endless hours working in jobs that they don’t like, to buy things they really don’t need.
Are you truly willing to exchange a day of your life (or many days for that matter) for a thing that you will not even remember 5 years down the road? The couch certainly wasn’t worth that to me!
And here is the happy ending:
I finally found a great couch just accidentally on craigslist a few days later, red, wide, long and the right fabric for the dogs, actually I found two and I bought them both!!!
