Sunday, January 4, 2009

The Story of My Stuff

Wow, marathon day of tidying and cleaning up from the holidays and I am far from finished. About six months ago I watched a movie called "The Story of Stuff" and you really have to check it out. Many of us have WAY too much STUFF and it really disrupts the our flow! Usually I declutter at least a grocery bag full of stuff each week, and more if I can. It seems that there is a constant flow of goods in and out of this house.

I love Christmas and winter time (while it's here) and have collected a good number of very expensive Christmas decorations. I like to take it out on Dec. 1st - give or take a few days, it has to be a weekend as it's quite the ordeal. Then we (I) take it down the last weekend before we go back to work after winter vacation. Well...this year I got lazy. I only took out about half of the items, and my poor son had his room packed with boxes that never got put back in the attic in the meantime. He had about a month where he could not do anything in his room due to the number of boxes in there. So instead of enjoying my evening cuddles with him, I kept feeling guilty each night I put him to bed.

He kept talking about having and wanting space this last month, but never referred to his room, he always wanted it in the livingroom - which he probably sees as my space and wanted to disrupt it a little?! Unsure of the motives, it is not until I write this that I realize that he was probably telling me in the only way a 3 year old knows how to, that he needed me to tidy my stuff up in his room.

Yesterday, I decluttered my daughter's bedroom as I could get around in there and it's so peaceful for her now. Today I managed to get all the Christmas stuff down and boxed and into the attic and tonight I vacuumed his new, spacious bedroom. You should have seen the smile on his face when he saw how much "SPACE" he had. He loved it. My daughter also said how much she liked things tidy. We all made an intention to keep our bedrooms tidy this year. We will help each other with this intention with a quick tidy up before going to bed at night. We are also going to put out our clothing the night before and that will take the guess work out of things in the morning.

I find that we live in such a disposable society. I admit that I too am trying to curb my spending and making more purchases second hand where I can, and donating many things that still have lots of life left in them. We still have too much stuff! Every weekday I am going to do a quick look through my home and try to fill a shopping bag full to donate. I was doing this once a week last year, now it's time to take it up a notch and let's see if I can get rid of at least five times that.

Instead of doing things I'd like to be doing - or going to bed at a reasonable hour...I am tidying and cleaning up stuff...organizing stuff. This must come to an end, one small step at a time! Flylady.com is a great resource for this, you should check it out also.

Do you have too much stuff cluttering up your life? Is it stopping you from doing things that you'd like to be doing? Take 15 min. today to gather a shopping bag - or more - full of items to donate. Today I took out 3 garden bags full that I was able to declutter in the massive marathon clean up I did this weekend. Good luck! Remember to fuel yourself with as many greens as possible to have the energy to get this stuff done! How are your goals coming along? I'm about to do my 15 min. of book writing...the outline is almost totally complete!

Eat Raw, Live Well,

Melinda

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