I am an emotional pack rat. I keep everything! This was highlighted as Jeremy and I packed up some things from our bonus room and I had three boxes of cards. Do I need three boxes of cards? No! Have I looked at the cards? No! Would I be freer if I got rid of the cards? Yes! What will I do? I have no idea. My hope is to go through the cards, keep the last or extra special ones from the people I love in my life and get rid of the rest. We’ll see how this works out.
I know Kon Mari is pretty hip right now and I understand why. I actually want to be a minimalist, but I do love memories and beautiful things around me. Those two desires aren’t mutually exclusive, but if not intentional, cannot co-exist. My desire to rid my home of too much stuff comes from the fact I have accumulated way too much and I haven’t moved in over 20 years. Jeremy and I will be moving soon and the need to purge is looming over me. Do I really want to haul this junk to our new place? No! So that tells me, I have to get rid of what I don’t find to be beautiful or useful (Thank you William Morris for these wise words). My tastes have changed and sending old decor to other happy homes has been easy. It’s the emotional items that are more difficult to remove from my physical environment. I don’t want to get rid of all of them, but I think in the keeping of all of them it has added stress. And there is the fear of every hoarder, what if I need it some day? What if I regret parting with it, it’s not replaceable. For items I can purchase again because answering the question of which causes more stress-the cost of storage or the cost of replacement is easy. It’s the emotional items that is hard.
So as I travel this journey and as we move to a new home, I’ll keep you posted. This won’t be a quick process as my son is just a sophomore in high school. We have no intentions of moving for at least a year because he will graduate from his current high school. However we have know that we would move to another county when he graduates. In adult years, two years are a blink of an eye.