I like a sense of abundance in my life.

When I find a shirt with a nice cut and good fit, I buy one in every color.

When I run across a bottle of wine I enjoy, I pick up two.

When I decide it’s a bath and magazine kind of night, I buy pretty much every magazine in the store.  I like the look of a giant stack of magazines on my bath tray, it feels abundant and luxurious.  The problem is that most magazines are crap and an extraordinary waste of money.  Sadly, that usually does not deter me from buying them.

I was checking out the newest shipment of magazines earlier and one of my yoga magazines looked particularly interesting.  I got the happy little jolt of expectation that I always get from impulse buys, and then I thought “well maybe I should get some more magazines so I have plenty to read in the bath tonight”.  More magazines equals more happiness!

I like to call it abundance, but I think a better word for it might be greed.  My baths rarely last long enough to finish an entire magazine, much less three or four, and the more magazines I have in my stack the less attention I pay to each one.  The truth is that buying a whole stack of magazines doesn’t make me any happier than just buying one.  The happy jolt I feel thinking about a whole stack of magazines is probably more about self-indulgence than true abundance.

So, I stuck to my guns and bought just the one yoga magazine and it is making me very happy.

Hooray for self-restraint!