We are doing some major remodeling at our office. We have closed one half of our office for remodeling, and moved people to the basement and the 12th floor during the work.
As I had to abandon my office, it was a great time to purge. I tossed tons of stuff and it was very liberating. Files that I hadn't used in years. Old 3/4 inch videotapes that I'll never view again. Files of clients that left us years ago. The landfill may hate me, but I feel a lot freer.
I've been thinking how that accumulation happens in a house. It really is just a natural process. The other day, I read an article talking about the high calorie count of some restaurant entrees. It did the math, and said even if you just eat that many extra calories by going to the restaurant once a month, over the course of a year you'd add XX amount of pounds...and XX amount of pounds in XX amount of years. Just one simple meal can add that much....a little like Elder Uchdorf saying that being one degree off when flying around the earth would get you off course by 500 miles.
How does that relate to home clutter? Well, we all save stuff, whether it's books we finished reading, art projects of kids, old tax records, etc. I don't know the number, but let's assume we naturally add another 100 pounds of stuff to house a year. (Not hard to assume if you include heavier purchases) In 20 years, that's ONE TON more stuff than when you moved in.
I guess my point is just the need to regularly and routinely have a purging process to simply stay at par. To avoid being overrun, you need to eliminate at least as much as you accumulate each year or else you're losing the war.
2 comments:
AMEN!!! I love purging stuff...I've become very un-sentimental with stuff. It's liberating. We had a organization lady come to enrichment, and she challenged us to get rid of half of EVERYTHING in our houses. I want to try it!
I completely agree. Although i do think that the shift to a more "paperless" world helps. For example i no longer need to keep paper copies of journal articles at work. I have pdf versions of most things. The worst is all the stuff that comes home from school. I keep wondering when the schools are going to go paperless-ha ha!
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