![]() ![]() She explained that when her husband announced he was retiring and they were moving from their spacious home to a much smaller house, her life was thrown into turmoil. The most ingenious way I've heard yet to compact the belongings of a life-time without losing a thing was devised by a woman who came to one of my workshops. Once she understood that the shoulder pads were part of her past, she could keep a token pair and let the rest go. ![]() (Her mother, a Depression-era baby, had imbued her daughter with a "Save everything" philosophy.) "And the other ones are mine from when I had that great job," she admitted. "The big shoulder pads were my mother's," she replied. "Just tell me the reason you don't want to give them up," I said. She greeted me clutching a shoebox full of shoulder pads from the 1980s, squeezed into a nest of even larger ones from the 1940s. That approach worked well a few years ago when I was helping a childhood friend organize her new, much smaller home. The most effective way in my experience is to face the practical and emotional aspects of the problem at the same time. So how do we let go of all that irrelevant stuff? ![]() So can what I call future syndrome: "I might need this again sometime." But once we find a way to clear out what is no longer relevant to our lives-whether that be objects, activities, or even people-we open a path to look at all the parts of our lives and determine what matters to us now, not in the past or in the future. Remembrance of things past can be a real deterrent to moving forward. We all have cherished possessions that are freighted with meaning, and until we understand what that meaning is, we resist dealing with the messes that surround us. Much of the excess "stuff" I was able to dispatch without a qualm, but certain items hit me hard-the chair I had rocked my infant son in (he's now 38), and the 26 cartons of radio scripts from 17 years of covering health and lifestyle topics as a radio commentator in Los Angeles. Several years ago my husband and I made a move from 4,000 square feet of living space to 1,200. I'm a recovering clutterbug myself, and the subjects of clutter and decluttering are close to my heart. We can't even bear to think of what's stashed under beds or in the borrowed storage space in a relative's garage. We vow that this will be the year we keep the one resolution that invariably appears on our personal to-do list: Clean out the clutter in our basements, attics, closets, and home offices. A hallowed New Year's tradition occurs each January, when millions of us start kidding ourselves. ![]()
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