Recently we moved home. In the two months of preparation I deliberately kept a journal of the decluttering that needed to be done.
First week of our move
Yesterday I was at work in my office. The word office for this room might seem somewhat grand because it also doubles as a store room for furniture that I have not dared throw away, just in case it might be useful one day when a tenant needs it. So in addition to my much loved roll-top pine bureau with plentiful drawers and cubbyholes, you will see two enormous vintage 1940's wardrobes that I am hanging on to just in case I decide one day to add them into some of the upstairs bedrooms in this building. I have two double mattresses, a nicely upholstered Edwardian straight backed hall seat for two, a solid wood filing cabinet and, in the alcoves to either side of the fireplace, a pair of tall glass fronted book cabinets.
The ample floor space in this room is normally free of clutter, but this week I have made numerous car trips into work with the boxes that were filling my garage at home. I have been doing this before we move house - right in the middle of writing a book about decluttering and letting go - as apart of a deliberate decision to live with less and in a space that is better suited to the life we want to live.
I have eighty boxes to work through and the emotional pain of doing this is significantly more than I was expecting. These are the boxes that I have dragged around with me between homes for a number of years and which I have to open now that we are settling somewhere. I understand that this is not normal, that someone my age would by now have perhaps cracked the clutter code and found a way to let go of so much. I have never found this easy, and have always attached emotions, possibility or potential re-use to things that I have had in my life.
Box One
I opened the first box and realised that not one of several thousand sheets of papers in any of the ring-bound folders in the box were to keep. Most of them had a keep-until date that had passed at least two years before. I had kept them as the Revenue service always ask you to keep the paperwork for a business for seven years after the year represented by those same records. I hadn't thrown them away because I hadn't dared approach the task of sorting, sifting and saying goodbye to them. The box of files weighed fully 20 pounds. I separated the paper from the files and recycled it all. So far, so good. I can do this.
Box Two
Two dozen used A4 pads of lined writing paper, 65 usable pens, a hole punch, a vintage wood and brass manual coffee grinder in good order that I had been given by friends in Belgium when I was perhaps eighteen. That was some decades ago. I had wondered where it was! The pads of notepaper went onto a stationery shelf, and the pens went into a plastic bag for donating to my local library. They are always running out of pens and I love to work there on new manuscripts, so this feels like a good outcome.
Box Three
Some small card boxes of new one inch screws. A thoughtful 'remember me' gift from a former girlfriend which had been sent to me unannounced at my new address the Christmas after we broke up. It was a finely sculpted wooden head on a stand, designed to take a pair of reading glasses. Cute, but completely forgotten. It was still in the padded bag it had arrived in and a handwritten note "Good luck in your new life x." I felt sad, pleased to be away from that, and disappointed in myself that I had carried the object and the associated negative karma of it around in my life for the subsequent seven years. Next to this another envelope containing an almost new looking set of souvenir postcards from a visit to Uzbekistan that I had made 22 years before! This was a total surprise.
I could not remember buying them or perhaps having been given them by my hosts for that trip. A box of marbles from my own childhood. A wooden chest containing an old pub game and which I remembered buying in a beautiful antique shop on a sunny day in Monmouth four years ago. I bagged up the love gift, the marbles and the pub game and placed them in a pile for the charity shop, our goodwill store.
Going through just these three boxes took me almost an hour. I calculate that more than two thirds of the stuff within the boxes, by volume, was binned. The pens can be used by the library staff and the rest goes to have a new life via the charity shop. When I saw the note with the wooden gift I didn't cry, but I was upset and sad. Sad that something once so good and joyful did not last. Upset that I had hung onto an item knowing I would never use it, believing since opening it that I would have returned it to her, yet consciously allowing it to take up physical space, less aware of the subtle emotional toll."
What are you hoarding?