Paring down to a manageable level is an interesting exercise. I have been reading about it for years and I have certainly released many kilograms of unneeded items. Not quite so many kilograms have come in through the door, so I’m counting that as a small win.
I love the clean lines of minimalism but I would not say I was the minimalist type. I’ve always been sentimental. I still have gifts people gave me 30 or 40 years ago. These people are no longer in my life but I treasure their gifts anyway. I have a great swathe of hanging clothes (not all of which I wear) and some packed away, including costumes from my dancing childhood. I have the evidence of old hobbies. I have aspirational clutter. I have bought items for the nebulous ‘when I have time’ and I hold on to them because one day I know – at least, I think – I will use them.
But the greatest help to me in getting my household under some control (admittedly it’s a work in progress) is the knowledge that I can part with things that I don’t use. That it’s okay to do so. This knowledge has been a very long time coming. Overcoming possession guilt is a weird and convoluted business, but one reason I am managing it is that I have been gradually going through my mother’s gigantic packing shed and tiny house.
I decided on an onion-like approach. First I would go through and throw out just rubbish – the outer layer that I knew was utterly worthless. Unbelievably, that probably halved the stuff in the shed, which gave me some hope that I would be able to accomplish the overwhelming task I had set myself. I have to thank the council for doing a hard rubbish collection because that made it possible to get rid of big items like the dead fridge, broken furniture and other sizeable articles that are otherwise hard to get to leave the premises. This gave me some more little clearings in the corridors that had been made.
The next layer of the onion was stuff from the past that I knew held no great emotional hold and was simply the result of delayed decisionmaking. I opened a giant box that I think a freezer must have come in, and realised it had never been opened since being packed to move more than 30 years before. There were some useable items in there – probably two apple boxes worth of clean stationery. 1978 diaries, anyone? Yes, I know the days and dates correspond with one of the years we’re having soon, but probably not 10 of them. Of course, they can be used for notepaper … but as always with this kind of hoarding, there is enough notepaper for three people’s lifetimes.
I have come to the conclusion that it is sad not to recognise when things need to be let go. If you have a lot of space available, you can keep things for an unconscionable time but it doesn’t benefit you in any way. Of course it’s fun to keep some of it. Look at the wages they were getting in 1966. Oh look, here’s a shilling. Must have been before February 1966, then. But the fun bits are few and far between and there’s a lot of hefting and decision making to do amongst it. Better to have a box of treasures and have all the fun without any of the pain, surely?
The onion was looking much better by now. Very tatty, because I did’t really organise too much as I went, but decidedly smaller. It was getting harder to fill the garbage bin each time I went to do an hour or two on the mammoth project. But then I discovered the $20 rule. If you would be able to replace it, today, for $20 or less and you can’t really see a need for it in the very near future, that item can be released (to the bin or the charity shop, depending what it is) and the decision making process is done. You don’t have to worry about that item ever, ever again. It’s gone. And if you find you might need it, you simply replace it at the time you require it. That gets rid of about 1000 items that you might find a use for some day. If you have done this step assiduously, you will have to put your hand in your pocket to replace the two or three items that you might actually use over the next 10 or 20 years. Sixty dollars well spent (in the future), I think. And if you don’t have to spend 16 hours looking for an item, well, that’s a bonus. The truth is that people don’t usually spend too long looking. They just go out and buy another one, so there’s an opportunity cost either way.
Throwing out the rubbish that my mother collected over 80 years has been an interesting exercise because it has strengthened a muscle that I had never used and I now at least look at my own items more honestly. If I don’t use something, then really, why do I have it? Old technology, broken items, excess amounts … they don’t make my life any better. They actually weigh me down a little because everything I own has to be touched at some time to be moved, cleaned and placed back. Why? To move, clean and put back again next time I am cleaning this area?
So the value of a thing has become more about its value to me today than its importance in my life in the past (to an extent – I’m not totally reformed). I don’t have to believe in the fairytale that it’s still worth something to me just because I have owned it and lugged it through two moves or it’s always been sitting on that particular shelf in the bookcase. If it has value to someone else, well and good – I’ll give it away. I’m not really a reseller. I have been given tonnes of stuff over my lifetime (the house has been witness to that) and have parted with very little in comparison to the incomings. Now it is my turn to be the giver, so I can stay away from the buy, swap and sell places – physical and digital – and simply gift my stuff to someone else through the kind services of an op shop.
An interesting observation is this: I don’t think I could have done this if I hadn’t started with the pure rubbish at my mother’s place. I don’t think I could have skipped straight to paring down the items that might have some use in the future or have some use to someone else. I have needed time to process the ‘why’ of it all. Originally, I suppose I thought my mother must have had a good reason for keeping all this stuff and that to some extent I copied her without asking the important question. Well, there really isn’t a good reason for keeping rubbish. And throwing out the pure crap releases something inside you that makes it possible to look at the rest with new eyes.
I am slowly continuing to clear boxes and shelves of nearly worthless articles, kept for decades for nebulous reasons, perhaps simply from the lack of motivation to go through it. I can understand that. This process takes a lot of time and energy. I have only managed what I have by picking away at it. There have been many consecutive weeks where I have put out the council bin full, only to get so busy that I allow a month to slide by without throwing away a single plastic bag.
Looking around my own house, I doubt that you would know that all this has been going on in my brain. I’m sure it doesn’t look like your idea of a pared down house. I’m equally sure it would have been a hundred times quicker if I had gone through and decided on the things to keep, rather than the things to get rid of. That’s a different mindset and I think that as I continue this path I may get there. But at the moment I am still doing it the back-to-front way that most people have used all their lives. And even if it’s not perfect, it is saving me from drowning in stuff in the meantime.