Dave Bruno - The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul

The 100 Thing Challenge

How I Got Rid of Almost Everything,
Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul

Dave Bruno

To my friends and to the friends I have made:

That we may live joyful and thoughtful lives

on earth, not remembered for our

possessions. Instead, let us be known

for the gifts that come from our hearts.

For he will not much remember the days of his
life because God keeps him occupied with joy in
his heart.

E CCLESIASTES 5:20

Contents

A t thirty-eight years old, I can say that in many ways
I have realized the good life, or at least a plausible version of it. I am writing this book in my relatively large house comfortably situated at the end of a cul-de-sac. It is located in an award-winning master-planned suburban development in Southern California. Most evenings I can stand on the deck above our garage and watch the sun sink over the Pacific Ocean about ten miles away.

I have a beautiful wife who is a talented cook, parents marvelously, and loves to read and discuss thoughtful books. Together we have helped God create three daughters, all of whom are healthy and have excelled in their various activities. We are free of credit card debt. My career, first in technology, then as an entrepreneur in the publishing industry, and now in marketing at a university, has helped fund my contented middle-class lifestyle. Also, very generous parents have pitched in along the way.

I also own a dog. Piper is lying at my feet right now as I write. He is a mutt we rescued from the shelter. We think he is a cross between a German shepherd and a Rhodesian ridgeback. He is fast as lightning, has a keen nose, and is faithful to me.

Then there is the cat we have living with us. If anywhere, that is the place my good life starts to break down. Though I have a measure of affection for our cat, domesticated felines have their own agenda. Perhaps that is why no one talks about cats and the good life. For example, have you ever heard anyone mention a cat and the American dream in the same sentence? We tend to believe that opportunity has an agenda set by those of us who pursue it. Cats disagree. Unlike dogs, cats are absorbed by their personal concerns, not the aspirations of their owners.

But our house backs up to a field of coastal sage shrub that is home to a pack of coyotes. Those coyotes have been dining on neighborhood cats for years. Last spring they finally ate Eustace Clarence Scrubb, one of ours. Scrubb was a feral cat we adopted after he fell off the roof of our friends parents house and lost track of his cat family. Two weeks after Scrubb was eaten we replaced him with a new cat from the shelter we called Crisp. Our other cat, Beatrice, was indignant at the speed with which we exchanged Scrubb. She sulked for months, and I know why. She had finally learned a hard truth. Even cats must submit to human notions of the good life, in that cats can be substituted with remarkable nonchalance.

We talk about the good life or the American dream as if it were permanent, as if it were the finish line of a race. We say that we have arrived at the American dream. We announce that we are living the good life. And yet it has been my experience that, at least in our times, the good life and the American dream are more obsolescent than obtainable. A pet cat is never fully content, but lets be honest, whether youre a cat lover or not, domesticated kitties are replaceable. So, too, is everything we feel we need in order to be satisfied with our lives. We buy things year after year, over and over again, in our pursuit of contentment. It has been my impression that these days, replacement is emblematic of our dreams more than ownership. This is a curiosity, for it is by endlessly acquiring the right things that we measure our distance from the good life. We are always getting, but never getting there.

That was my observation as well as my personal experience. For much of my life I endeavored not for objects I could settle down with and enjoy, but just for new stuff. Too often this was my achievement: not working hard to earn some special thing, but rather, after tucking that special something away, going back out to the mall to buy again.

The 100 Thing Challenge, which my book describes, was one of several responses to the unsettled feeling I developed after years of living a life filled with stuff instead of contentmentafter arriving at a reasonable version of the American dream and still groping for more. I felt I might be chasing after what was not mine to have, and what I could never get anyway. It occurred to me that I felt less like myself and more like someone I should not be.

I was about to change that feeling.

Part One
The Challenge Takes Shape

H ere in Southern California we San Diegans have a saying. Hawaiians wouldnt appreciate it, but we say it nonetheless. We go outside, look around, and then say, Just another day in paradise.

The saying fits most every day of the year. In San Diego, near the ocean, its never bitterly cold and its never oppressively hot. I can appreciate the realities of the nonsublime weather in certain areas of the country. I spent a few years in Chicago for college, before heading back to San Diego. Then I returned to the Chicago area for two years of graduate school. I have figured that in the five years (sixty months) that I spent in the Midwest, forty months consisted of glacial winter. Another seventeen months were hot, airless summer. Perhaps three months over the entire five years were pleasant. Maybe even a day or two could have been described as idyllic. San Diego is different from that. Every five years we have about sixty months of heavenly weather.

On a July day a few years back, the weather was at its finest. The sun was shining about seventy-eight degrees warm. A cool offshore ocean breeze was wafting through the open windows of our house. If ever I might have been justified in exclaiming, Just another day in paradise, this was the day. But I didnt. I couldnt muster the words. I was agitated. In fact, I got so worked up that I had a crisis. A small, domestic crisis but a crisis nonetheless. The episode precipitated an epiphany or a eureka moment, or both. And in that short time, I found myself grumbling, I am taking the 100 Thing Challenge.

Even accounting for my eccentricities, that is a pretty unusual thing for me to say, so let me backtrack and explain what happened. On that Saturday, I was juggling a fairly industrious middle-class American lifestyle. My family consisted of my wife, Leanne, and my young daughters, Lucy, Phoebe, and Bridget, who all demanded my attention, which, I should say, I have always been happy to give them. Well, usually. Also I liked to hike in the mountains and desert. (In addition to perfect weather and proximity to the ocean, San Diego is close to mountains and deserts.) The dog needed walking closer to home and the cats needed to be kept safe from hungry coyotes. I owned a guitar that I would play every other night. I had my aspirational hobby, woodworking, which I turned my attention to once a weekend. I made a living with my day job in the marketing department of nearby Point Loma Nazarene University. On the side, I ran an audiobook publishing business, ChristianAudio. And I had been blogging for a few years, mostly railing against excessive consumerism, at StuckInStuff.com. Basically, I was a husband and father; an outdoorsy, animal-loving, wannabe singer-songwriter; an entrepreneur; a likes-to-use-his-hands kind of guy who also felt a compulsion to write. And because I did all of these things, I had my own desk. It sat near my bed for the sake of convenience. It sometimes got messy.