“I need that.” A phrase I’ve said aloud or thought in my head millions of times in my life. I’ve trained myself to believe that I need so many trivial, material things. Over the past six months or so, I’ve been working on becoming more of a minimalist in a lot of ways and attempting to reverse that pattern of thought. It started first with selling and purging many of my material possessions. I was tired of being “too busy” all the time for the things that I really needed to make room for in my life. My time was often spent shopping for things, buying things, organizing things, cleaning things, moving things – most of which were all unnecessary and a ginormous time suck.

As I was purging my life of so many unnecessary material possessions, a friend of mine was telling me of a time he was at a friend’s house and opened up the door to a kitchen cupboard and it was EMPTY. My mind was fixated on the image of an empty cupboard. Can you imagine that? How many of you have an empty cupboard anywhere in your house? I imagine not many. If we do have an empty cupboard, we’re inclined to fill it with something… anything. We’ll even go out and buy something in order to fill the empty space as if it’s bad to have an empty cupboard. Our desire for material possessions simply needs to be trained.

As I continue to strip back the layers of all the wants in my life, I find that many of my perceived needs are, in reality, only wants as well. In fact, I have found that there is truly very little that we absolutely need in life. Don’t believe me? Tell me what you need and I imagine I can find someone or some culture in the world (with the help of Google) that considers your need a want and lives without it.

Focus on the empty cupboard. What are the needs in your life that are actually only wants?