Thank you for all your purging stories.
As many of you have voiced, it’s the getting started part that’s the hardest.
We often think we need a lot more information than we do to start the purging process.
It’s not necessary to have a formulated “life plan” to begin with.
What many of you have discovered, is that in the act of just getting rid of what you know for sure you’ll never use (or haven’t used in quite some time) the process beings to build momentum all on it’s own.
It’s not like starting a diet where you have no idea whether it will work or not, after starving yourself to death. Because the moment something hits the trash or donation bag, you instantly start losing the the weight of stuff you’ve let rule your life, take over your rooms and rob you of the kind of harmony you deserve.
As you start actually looking at what you own, far more, “emotionally” comes up for review than you ever expected.
Trust me, it can often throw you into overwhelm and you just shut the door and tell yourself that you’ll get to all that crap when you have “proper” time to focus.
It’s like saying, I won’t start my diet til after the holidays. At that point I’ll inflict food deprivation upon myself and hope for the best. And with that promise in mind, I’ll eat like it’s the end of the world.
With home purging you don’t have to put on a hazmat suit or erect folding tabes or quadrant off a room with plastic.
Just start with getting rid of the obvious junk.
The chipped stuff.
The crap that you know for sure, for sure, is only there because you haven’t gotten rid of it.
You don’t even have to expect to have instant fully organized results on your first pass.
In fact, you don’t even have to worry about the harder decisions til you’re ready.
You don’t have to decide if you’ll ever use the bread machine again. You may not have time to hold the salad spinner up long enough to realize that you’ve been buying salad in a bag for the last 10 years.
You don’t have to be faced with the cutesy lamp your in-laws gave you that you’ve always hated. Or the ugly ass table your kid made in shop class. Or the huge camper in the driveway that you only used one summer. Or the china that only saw the dining room table once. Or even the dining room table that you only use well...hardly ever.
Those are the harder decisions that will in fact include some kind of “come to Jesus“ reconciliation.
What I’m taking about is the junk. The wobbly chair no one can sit in. The old curtains that went with the place you lived in 20 years ago but thought one day they’d make nice throw pillows.
I’m taking about the cracked mirror you saved because you still like the frame but which now falls out of the closet every time you open the door.
Or the canning jars you never used but maybe they can be shabby chic drinking glasses when you do that al fresco party "under the stars" in the back yard that, at the moment, looks like Gray Gardens.
It’s the dull scissors that couldn’t even cut tofu.
It’s the buttons spares that came with the outfit you no longer own.
It’s the 12 pack package that only has one AA battery in it. —That little container of twisty ties and bottle caps that you never use but keeps falling over every time to reach for the ziplock bags.
Seriously, I’m talking about the stupid stuff. The no-brainers, you know?
Just tackle that stuff first.
Because here’s the thing (accounted in the hundreds of letters we’ve received) in just starting there, with the little things, with no other anal retentive expectations, in the act of doing so, something bigger starts to happen.
You start to notice not only what you own, but you also begin to see actual empty space, which gets you thinking that you might as well just keep going because this drawer might ultimately be the perfect place for something you actually use all the time but can never find easily when you need it.
The creativity starts kicking in, and this kind of tough love Norma Rae thing emerges.
You start getting bolder. With the trash bag already there and open, it becomes an “oh what the hell, just get rid of it” kind of thing.
Pretty soon you get hooked on cleansing the temple with a vengeance. Ah the power of it all!
There may be very little one can control in this world, but dang it all, you can control the things you have surrounded yourself with. You have the power to purge within your scope and the ability to ‘let go’ if you what too.
As you begin the simple process, you’ll be given a ton of new ideas without consciously even knowing it. The mind starts thinking about possibilities and you’re off to the races.
So, with the weekend just around the corner give it a shot!
You can do it!!
Bye for now!
CL.