Between 1999 and 2004 I moved six times:
- Canada to Colorado
- New apartment
- Townhouse
- Wifey’s and my first apartment
- Second apartment
- Back to Canada
Each time I used the move as an opportunity to declutter, to throw away stuff I no longer used or wanted but, unfortunately, I wasn’t really harsh enough in my decision making.
It wasn’t until we bought our house that I really cleared the detritus.
We had been in the same apartment for five years and had accumulated a lot of crap. We also had unopened boxes left from the move home from Colorado. Stuff we never even looked at.
It was ridiculous, I had boxes unopened for seven years. That was when I got brutal.
Those unopened boxes? Gone. Thousands of books? Gone. Furniture that just sort of landed on us, but was never really useful? Gone. Anything broken or unused? Gone.
It was liberating.
10 years later, we have a house full of the detritus from a decade of raising kids, and it’s weighing me down. Over Christmas, wifey and I decided we had to simplify, and every time we apply ourselves to it, we find masses of stuff that we only hold on to out of sentimentality.
This weekend I worked myself to exhaustion, accumulating five garbage bags of stuff to be disposed of, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s simultaneously liberating, and daunting.
So I propose a new simple, yet hard, rule for living.
- Regularly clean out your crap.
It’s only weighing you down, so free yourself from it, because “freeing” is another word for “liberating,” and getting rid of crap is liberating.
Liberate yourself, get rid of your crap.
