Whenever I make an effort to get rid of stuff – whether it has been my paperbacks, compact disks, or notebooks – I start by viewing it as a logistical challenge:
- How do I sort the wheat from the chaff?
- How am I going to minimize the overall waste - someone else might want it, such as housemate, or a neighbor, or friend or the opportunity shop
- How am I going to better store what I keep so that I don’t just have the same stress of decluttering again in x months.
The following is typical of my decluterring routine:
- I pull numerous original and burned CDs (that I have ripped onto my laptop), as well as numerous mis-burned CDs, out of storage.
- I figure that I can sell the original CDs, give away the burned CDs, and use the mis-burned CDs as decorative mobiles.
- I move them into the hallway to await their exciting futures.
- After a week, I realize that no one buys CDs anymore; that I can just give my friends the mp3s; and those mobiles actually look rather kitsch come to think of it.
- I throw them all out.
I now try to engineer such ‘long goodbyes’ in the disguise of a cooling-off periods, with the help of ‘protophysics’. For example, I will put an old but artistic poster on my wall above my desk, and after a day or two realize that it just does not ‘go’ with the room or with me anymore. I will then put it into the ‘out pile’ - maybe I will get around to taking them down to the op-shop, but if not, it will passively ‘fall’ in with the recycling as a matter of course.
1 comments:
I've been getting rid of stuff for a couple of years now in preparation for our upcoming overseas move. Hardest for me was books.
I've gotten rid of hundreds, have boxes more to sell, as well as several boxes of books that are out of print and not available for my Kindle (or likely to be). Those will go into storage until such time as we feel settled enough to ship a few things.
Letting go of our things is difficult, because we have a tendency to store pieces of our identities into whatever it is.
Post a Comment