I just had a couple of epiphanies related to my shoe collection (and on a side note: where are all the 'epiphanies' posts? Is nobody having any epiphanies anymore?!)

To start off, I just wanted to mention that I don't really count my clothes because there are too few of them to make it worthwhile. For example, I have 15 pairs of shoes (Ok, I just counted them right there, but that was because it's easy to count shoes if you only have 15 of them.)

The small quantity of clothing means I can see everything that I have, and if I'm missing something it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly.

Or does it?

Well, in the case of my shoes, nothing is obvious to me, apparently.

In reviewing Aurore and Suz' posts, I was struck by the fact that I do not think that hard about my footwear, and that I SHOULD think harder. I need to ask myself the basic questions.

To me, the basic questions are:
- Do you have a shoe for every activity in your life?
- For each activity, do you have enough variety of shoes for that activity?
- With respect to the shoes you do have, do you enjoy them? If not, why not?

Those are really the only questions you need to ask, right? Or maybe you can think of some others.

Anyway, after asking myself those questions, a few revelations presented themselves:

1. To answer question 1: I am missing some shoes for tramping around outside in the grass and dirt. The reason is because I can only think of doing this in hiking shoes, which are so NOT me. I think a little piece of me would die if I wore hiking shoes. What do I do about this? How do I get past my hate of hiking shoes? Is there another shoe type for grassy and dirty excursions in the spring/summer?
Other than that, I have everything covered.

2. To answer question 2, yes, I do have enough variety. I actually don't need a lot of variety in footwear.

3. To answer question 3, I am indeed unhappy with my shoe collection. You would think that with only 15 pairs of shoes, that'd I'd mega-love them all, each one being a beautiful specimen piece and all that, but that's not the case. Why? It seems that it's because I need BASIC black shoes, and what I have are all non-basics because I have been avoiding black. So while I enjoy my non-basic shoes, not having anything but leaves me feeling unhappy (can your mind parse all the negatives in that sentence? :-)) It's like my collection is still incomplete.

it would be nice to have a few classic, black staples that I can wear over several years.

So my conclusions are:

- I need a better 'system' for shoes, and I think I've found it: Have a few black 'essential' shoes (I'm allowed expensive ones since they will span several years; I am thinking about 5 years): Tall black winter boots, high-shaft black booties, black loafers. Punctate this basic wardrobe with some statements (which will be cheaper, and will be less worn).

- I'm not sure I can solve the hiking shoes problem without outside help.

Thanks for reading!