Every year about this time, I launch another round in my perennial War Against Clutter. The difference is, this year I’m going to win!
How? Research! I have an entire bookshelf full of books about fighting clutter. Surely one of them will have some good advice.
“Attachment to clutter will steal both quality and quantity from your life.”
It began, this time, with a payment I was expecting from our insurance company. They say they already sent it – and that the time to cash it is running out. Worse yet, I realize that I’ve seen it somewhere … but where? It could be anywhere.
“Any where?” asks my husband, turning a little pale.
“Yup, anywhere in the house.”
“At least you’ve narrowed it down,” he says, on his way off to work..
First, I tear through the papers on the dining room table; then a pile on the kitchen counter. Oops! That reminds me, I never put away the peanut butter from lunch.
I open the cabinet and out fly some moths. Something has obviously been in there too long. Gotta empty everything out, wipe the cabinets down, and throw away the old boxes. (Looks like I’m never making that pecan grits casserole, after all).
I need a garbage bag. There’s a box of them around somewhere …but where? And you know what the experts say:
“Handle nothing more than once.”
It seems to me that that just puts the clutter in charge of your schedule, but what do I know? I’m not the expert.
As I look for garbage bags in the upstairs linen closet, I realize that even more urgent than either the bags or that insurance check is the fact that spring is finally here, and I am sweating like a banshee in my winter clothes. So I look for my “spring collection,” by which I mean the carton with my ratty old cut-offs and T-shirts. I think it’s in the attic.
What do I find? One box after another full of papers and mail. This is where everything went from the dining room table whenever company was coming, or I needed to use the table for actual food.
All the experts agree:
“If you can put your clutter away for one full calendar year, and haven’t missed it, you can safely throw it out.”
But it just isn’t true! As I go through one box after another, I find real treasures: my last-ever birthday card from an aunt who’s now passed away; the kids’ school photos; a title deed to one of the cars; yes, that insurance check; and most precious of all, a “Happy Mother’s Day” gift from one of my kids, when he was little, his picture still glued on with sequins and glitter. Just imagine if THAT had gone to the curb, condemned as mere, disposable “clutter”!
“Clutter is space wasted in your present, and time wasted in your future.”
The problem, of course, is that no matter how tight a ship you run, more and more stuff comes into the house every day. And when I stand there, holding it, it comes alive. Each piece appears to me like a shipwrecked sailor, adrift with me in my tiny lifeboat on a merciless sea. Every trinket, every scrap, clutches at my hands begging piteously not to be thrown overboard: “Please, keep me! Don’t throw me out there to the sharks!”
Would it be so hard to find just a little more room?
“Every piece of clutter is a decision you have put off. Stop deferring the decisions; make them now!”
You know what I don’t need in the lifeboat with me? A nag; a scold; a snob. Suddenly I know where I’ll find some room.
By the time my husband comes home that night, the project is complete.
“What do you think?” I ask him. “Doesn’t that look better?”
Silently, he looks around the house. The kitchen is still an uproar of shopping bags, empty and full; the dining room table is still covered with junk mail and bills; the hall closet doors still won’t shut, they’re so full of “just things we wear every day;” and every remaining horizontal surface is piled high with clothing being sorted.
“Off-hand, it’s a little hard to see the improvement,” he says, warily.
“Ah, but look!” I point proudly to the empty shelf at the bottom of one bookcase.
“What was that?” he asks.
As if he didn’t notice that all the books about clutter are at the curb!
