Decluttering

I’m on a bit of a decluttering kick. I’ve never been FOR clutter, really, and it seems I’m always recycling this and donating that and tossing the other out. I believe in what the experts in this area say, that allowing useless stuff to gather around you zaps your energy and wastes your time!

So I’ve been reading the book, It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh of TV’s Clean Sweep. He offers practical ways to get rid of things you don’t really need. Lots of people fall into traps of thinking they’ll need something “someday”. I’m like that with clothing sometimes, I must admit, but hey, no one’s perfect!

I don’t hang on to many bulky mementos but those I do keep tend to be truly useless! I have a decades old baseball shirt with my Dad’s old company logo and colours on it that I expect to get up and walk away under its own steam some day. I just keep packing and repacking it and moving it with me everywhere. I’ve also kept airchecks of my work on radio throughout my career. I have literally dozens and dozens of cassettes and DATS. It’s difficult to part with that stuff even though I have no intention of ever listening to it again and I would never, ever subject anyone else to any of it! So out it goes.

One of the great ideas in this book, and from other anti-clutter gurus, is to take a photograph of a sentimental item and give the actual item up. So I thought I would start small. These are my Aunt Marg’s sunglasses. She died 20 years ago and over the years I’ve eventually divested myself of nearly everything I had of hers; clothes, jewellery, ceramics (although I still have one turtle). But I hung on to these hideous old Jackie O glasses that take up half a person’s face and have very strong prescription lenses. So I took this photo of them and their well preserved velvet case and I’m going to donate the glasses to a drive for people in need overseas. Surely someone will have a use for them and they’re just taking up valueable space here in the tiny shoebox condo.

Once the glasses are out I can work on getting rid of other, bigger things this way. All I want to keep is the memory and that’s in my head and heart, not with the “thing”, right? I really don’t have a lot to work through but I know it will still feel good when I’m done.