Last week, at work, was once again sheer pandemonium. What with being the only of the colleagues left at the office who wasn´t taking their annual vacation, plus another spell of above-thirty-degrees centigrade heat, I neither had any time left to blog, nor did I have, come Friday, any energy left.
So I allowed myself a Bruno Mars style lazy Saturday (as in Today I´m not doing anything, less the part about the nice girl;)), and on Sunday my spirits had returned enough - and the temperature dropped- to make me go at another decluttering project I had been procrastinating about, namely, those red IKEA boxes I keep on top of a shelf in my living room to contain small stuff and papers that aren´t currently needed but which I don´t want to toss, either.
I took all of them down and went through the contents, culling what I didn´t regard as a keeper any more and shredding the discarded papers at once.
With regards to that, an important lesson- just because I once decided an item should be kept, doesn´t mean that decision won´t be revised by time. Where I live, there´s no real possibility that I´d ever need, say, the heating bills from my former flat again when I´ve moved out twelve years ago, nor the repair bills from my old car or even a ticket for speeding I got five years ago. So, what I do is set an expiration limit and return to the receptacle I put the stuff in after it expires. Yesterday, that meant that the content of one whole box went to the shredder. Which came as quite a surprise, as I had already gone through that stuff years ago and ditched all those old rental contracts from long-ago flats, operating manuals for gadgets I no longer own, and receipts for non-taxable payments completed ages ago. And still there was one box´s worth of paper trash that could be tossed immediately.
Another box turned out to hold the remains of my formerly beloved Star Wars collection. I had, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, been an avid collector of roleplaying books, which I hadn´t ditched because I had still hoped they might have some resales value.
Not so. I checked the prices for those on Momox, and found out that of all the lot, only two had an asking price at all, which was a fraction of what I had paid for them and wouldn´t have been worth the hassle of having to pack and post them. So, the whole lot is now in the recycling bin, making me a lot wiser as to the futility of keeping things in the hope that they might be worth something someday. While there might be someone out there who is as crazy about that stuff as I used to be, I won´t keep the stuff on the off chance of finding him because the now empty box it was in can certainly be put to a better use.
In total, I ended up with two completely empty boxes, and enough free space in some of the others to allow me to relocate some items from my everyday filing cabinet, freeing the latter up a bit.
Once again, getting rid of things of the past will give me space to live my present life. It´s liberation at its best, and I will, whenever I have a sliver of time left, continue to weed out the stuff that´s left.
The best thing being that, due to the shopping embargo I keep, the result of such a session is really free space, not just a chance to stash some more acquisitions. And that is definitely something I can get used to.
Julia
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