Decluttering never stops

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life - Gail Blanke (Springboard Press, 2009)

Over the summer I went through a fairly massive uncluttering project. There were a bunch of boxes that I packed up when I moved out of my 1 BR and had sat in a garage for almost 3 years. And if you are like me, you know that at some point in the packing process, things start getting a little jumbled up -- office supplies, decorations, sentimental knick knacks, etc. I did a pretty decent job at getting rid of things, including letting go of some harder things, like gifts that I appreciated but knew I would never use.

But I didn't feel done, and when I heard about Blanke's book, the concept of an assignment (50 things, seems like a SMART goal to me - aside: I prefer action-oriented for A) really appealed to me. I needed someone to walk me through my house and force me to make a list. (List!) So while decluttering phase one was about trying to weed out some of the boxes of stuff, this phase was going to be about going through all of the unpacked items.

So far, so good. What I really needed was a reminder that holding on to something because of its history isn't a good idea if it comes along with too many (or any really) negative associations. There were items that I realized were too linked to times and people from which/whom I wanted to move on. Some of them I kept, but several I let go. Or at least tried to gather in a single place so there would just be one box of yucky memories. This was great. But my list had trouble, because I had already tossed so much stuff just a few months ago. And for a variety of reasons, I wasn't willing to deal with clothes in this go-round.

So I lost momentum. And then I got to the second half of the book, which is about letting go of the mental clutter and discovering your empowered self. None of this was bad, especially, and if you sit and journal and count each piece of defeatist self-talk that you promise to let go of as a thing, you can get to 50 much more quickly. But I found myself a little unmoved. I don't want to say it wasn't valuable, but I think it didn't come at the right time for me.

And that's really the thing about books like this (well, and most books, probably): they need to show up at the right time. If they appear when you need them, they are amazing. If you're not ready for them, they won't penetrate. So I'll take the good parts and let go of the parts that didn't work for me. And maybe I'll come back to this later and it will be a totally different part of the book that speaks to me.