Simplicity
“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink, for thirst is a dangerous thing.”
Jerome Klapka Jerome
Some friends of mine have been downsizing. Their only child goes off to college in the fall and they owned a large house with two free-standing studios and a pool, as well as a three story lake house. They bought and renovated a small, cottage house that is perhaps half the size of their previous home. The process of culling down and clearing out, of deciding what goes and what stays, what can be given away and what can be sold, has been a year-long process. They had some physical constraints that helped in the decision making, since their new house simply would not hold even half of what they possessed; still it was a gut-wrenching progression.
We Americans get attached to our stuff. When I cleaned out my parents’ house a few years ago, I was overwhelmed at the shear magnitude of junk accumulated over forty years of procrastination. I encountered such mind-boggling things as zip-locs filled with used twist ties. There must have been five-thousand of them! An entire high-boy dresser full of paper—back taxes and cancelled checks from the early 80’s onward. Every prom dress or bridesmaid dress that my sister and I had ever worn, carefully folded away (discolored and moldy) in a cedar chest. Fabric from every window curtain ever hung in any room of the house—bolts and bolts of cloth, half of it rotted with age. I could go on and on.
The point is, clutter can choke the life out of you. (And, if you leave it for your kids to clean up, it will cancel out a lifetime of love and good will!) If you’ve collected a lot of stuff, and the very prospect of tackling it makes you want to buy a one-way plane ticket to Outer Mongolia , here’s some advice: Pare the task down to one room or one closet at a time, even one box if necessary. Each day, one room or one closet. Give yourself a good long time line so that you don’t feel panicked about it, but stay on task. Don’t push yourself to do more on a given day than you’ve planned for. Make three piles: save, give away, and throw away. As soon as you finish that one room or closet, take the throw away to the trash, the give away to the thrift store, and the save to wherever it’s going to be in your house. Day by day, room by room, you will begin to feel lighter and more spacious.
Clutter weighs you down. If you haven’t used something in a year, that's a pretty good sign it’s clutter. The fact that something belonged to great-great grandma doesn’t make it sacred. If it’s precious, give it to someone who will love it. And for the love of Pete, after you’ve used a twist tie, throw it away!
Keep the faith,
Jane
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