It's absolutely amazing how much stuff we accumulate throughout our lives. And is it any wonder? We live in a consumer's paradise. It is ingrained into our little heads that we need to buy, buy, buy! Without things you can never be truly happy. Even if you don't need it, you should still get it. Everybody else has it...you should too!
I've even seen a Target ad on the TV lately...prodding you to get in their store and buy anything and everything in sight. I'm disgusted.
And it's even worse for those of us that are packrats. Accumulating stuff with no intention of ever getting rid of any of it. And the piles grow and grow...eventually the walls of stuff tower above you and the walls begin to close in on you. Claustrophobia isn't an option...you're trapped in a tumbling maze of stuff with no escape in sihgt.
I like to think of myself as a reformed packrat. There was no twelve step program for me...no therapy to escape my addiction to stuff. Instead, I began watching those television shows where people are so trapped in their clutter-filled lives that their stuffhas taken over. You know that these people have floors in their houses, but you can't see them. Furniture has to be under all that junk somewhere! Where do these people sit, sleep, eat? How do they live?
I would watch those shows and watch the clutter expert come in and help them make sense of all of the junk that has been ruling their lives. Why are you keeping this? What hold does it have over you?
I began looking around my house and noticing that I had a lot stuff, too. (This realization was compounded by the fact that my husband and I were living in a 900 square foot shoe box at the time.) And the more I looked around, I couldn't figure out why I had it all. How is it that I had made it through so many moves in such a short time and still managed to hang on to all of these things? Some of them hadn't even been out of the boxes since two moves ago! They were languishing down in the basement...just sitting there waiting for me to rediscover them. And even worse...I thought about how much stuff we had already gotten rid of! What would our lives be like if we still had it all?!? Do we need an intervention???
The turning point for me was when Hubby and I moved into our new house. The sense of pride that comes with ownership took over. I was putting a lot of myself into decorating this new nest of ours, and I didn't want it cluttered up with a bunch of junk. As we unpacked boxes (and there were a lot of boxes!), we found ourselves asking why we still had some of the stuff that we were rediscovering. The simple solution was to wrap whatever we couldn't bear to see in the new house back up and put it into another box. Box after box after box began to accumulate in the garage. Why was it all here? This stuff that in the past we couldn't bear to give up had now turned into something bigger than us...stalking us from location to location during the course of our lives!
It felt good to pear down. Slice objects from our lives...dead weight that served no real purpose in our existance. As I moved through the piles and piles of stuff I discovered that it became so easy to let go. Old clothes that I never wore or no longer liked made it into the pile (never mind the fact that I had gotten rid of bags and bags and bags of clothing while in Germany, and even before leaving for Germany...here I was now getting rid of more!). Odd dishes that I couldn't even remember exactly whyI had bought them. Glasses and coffee mugs of odd sorts...board games, books, unwanted household decor. Hubby contributed, too...video games, elecronics, toys...more clothes.
The stuff piled up until we were able to fill our front yard with it on a nice, warm and sunny day. We thought we'd see if we could make a few bucks off of it before giving it away. And we did...that felt good, too! And to top it all off, we found someone to come haul it all away at the end of the day. Everything that was left went...enough to fill up her van. We weren't sorry to see it go. That was probably the best part of the day...the weight of all of that stuff being taken from our lives.
And we haven't missed any of it.
Tonight, I worked my way through the last part of the house that needed to be squared away from the move...my craft nook. More stuff. As I shifted through the stuff that represented my past, I still found myself asking why I had hauled some of this stuff with me...why had I allowed it to stalk me across the world? The more I let go, the easier it is to toss things. Old things...things that really don't mean as much to me as I thought they did.
Sifting through the piles and piles of memories, I found a few things that were too sweet to let go of. A few letters here and there (representative of a practice that has been lost since the implementation of computers and emails!). A note. An invitation. A program from a special event. Photos. Handmade cards. These things stayed. Most of the items that I sifted through went. Memories that I no longer care for, or long ago forgot.
Now I look around me at my newly created area. An area for inspiration - void of the senseless clutter that resided in here for months and months...taunting me and forbidding me from using my nook. The piles grew and grew until I couldn't bear it any more...I had to cleave it from my life before I went mad!
Yes...I am a reformed packrat. Bound and determined to be free of the choking grasp of the stuff. Sometimes I think that I may go a little bit overboard in my desire to live a stuff-free life. But, really, I think that I'm better off because of not having it.
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