By Jim Hagarty
2005
Clutter and I have been involved in hand-to-hand combat for the past few months and for a while, I thought I was winning. But trip after trip of carrying things out of the house to throw away, recycle or donate, didn’t seem to be making the mountain of material objects any less arduous to climb. I was truly puzzled by this phenomenon; surely if you take things away from a pile, the pile must begin to shrink. Alas, no shrinkage occurred. In fact, the exact opposite seemed to be true: the clutter was gaining on me at an alarming rate.
Then, a morning of meditation finally brought the truth to me. At the same time as I was obsessively lugging old stuff out the back door, the other three members of the household were busy hauling new stuff in the front. With the odds stacked against me like this, I fear I’ll be found dead some day beneath a heap of winter clothes, a bunch of boxes, foam and plastic bags from new purchases and a plethora of manufactured goods of dubious use. The needability of many of these items is borderline or below.
Still, I carry on, pun intended, my arms full of belongings that were once held in great esteem but which have now been tripped over (literally) far too many times.
Every night I search the Internet for quality clutter-busting tips and have discovered a whole world out there of people who have suffered as I have from the weight of too many possessions. And of the thousands of words of advice I’ve read, comes this basic, number one rule:
Do you use this thing? If not, why do you possess it?
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Thanks Internet guru.
The push was on to simplify.
Another useful suggestion was to not try too hard to get a fair buck for everything. Just get rid of it, the sooner the better.
It is amazing what wonders one little stake on your lawn bearing a hand-scrawled sign labelled “FREE” can achieve toward the goal of declutterization. There is almost nothing, it seems, that won’t become instantly irresistible at the amazing, once-only, bargain-basement price of zilch. Nuts, bolts, wire, curtains, windows, picture frames, you name it.
By mistake, I put in the give away box a pair of old eyeglasses that I intended to donate to my optometrist to take on her next mission to Guatemala. She won’t be taking them, however; amazingly to me, someone fished them out of the box and took them home. Here’s what puzzles me. The glasses were bifocals. To be of any use to you, your vision needs would have to match not only the regular prescription but the bi-focal one too.
I don’t care. They’re gone. Just 2,346 items left to go. But with my family hauling material things in the front door at such a rapid rate, I fear I will forever be the frustrated man who is shovelling his driveway during a snowstorm and wondering why he isn’t getting ahead.
