The junk drawer
I recently learned you can get a little money for old phone chargers because of the copper inside them.
It isn't much.
Still, it sounded like a good excuse to finally clean out the electronics drawer.
So I dumped everything onto the kitchen table.
Phone chargers.
USB cables.
Old earbuds.
Random adapters.
A charger from a phone I haven't owned in years.
A cable for a GPS that used to come on every road trip.
Then I found four identical chargers.
"Why do I have four of these?"
Four words
The answer came almost immediately.
"I might need it someday."
I'd probably said those four words every time I tossed another charger into the drawer.
Not because I expected to use it tomorrow.
Because throwing it away felt like closing a door I wasn't ready to close.
I wasn't keeping them because I needed them.I was keeping them because I thought I might someday.
It's rarely about the charger
As I stood there looking at that pile of cables, I realized those same four words had quietly followed me into other parts of my life.
Not because I was disorganized.
Because keeping something asks almost nothing of us.
Letting it go asks us to decide.
Money has drawers too
The longer I thought about it, the more I wondered what was sitting in the financial version of that drawer.
Not because I still needed it.
Because I had never stopped to ask if I did.
Sometimes we hold onto financial decisions for exactly the same reason we keep old chargers.
Not because they're wrong.
Because they've become familiar.
One question
Before I put everything back, I started asking one question.
"If I didn't already own this, would I keep it today?"
It's a harder question than it sounds.
It turns out it has very little to do with chargers.
One charger
I recycled almost everything.
Almost.
I kept one charger.
The embarrassing part is that I'm not even sure what it fits anymore.
Apparently, 'I might need it someday' is harder to recycle than copper.
