When Your Stuff Overwhelms Your Life, Dump It
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by: Guest
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Most of us have too much stuff; it overwhelms us. Getting rid of everything you don\'t use or need is important to your overall health and peace of mind.
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In a previous article about other people's stuff, I mentioned getting rid of what no longer serves you. Unless you are currently using or really in love with what you have, it behooves you to move it on to someone else who can use or love it. This works for those who are not what I call 'fascinating people', who are those multi-talented creative people. Those of us who have that intense creative urge need a lot of various items to create with, both material and equipment. Even when the old, less useful stuff is discarded, there are still a lot of things around.
The problem remains: too much stuff and not enough space to put it all. One of the best investments one can make these days is to own a storage unit complex. If we all didn't have a hoarding problem, no one would make money on renting out storage units. Face it; we all have the disease, to one extent or another. Of course, the more fascinating we are, the more stuff we have. Suffering from that myself, it became overwhelming to have to deal with all of the stuff my fascinating husband left when he passed on.
We had moved into a huge house with more than one garage and storage buildings and then accumulated more things to fit our lifestyle together. While he objected to all of my own stuff, which he promptly termed 'junk', his own stuff was designated as 'important'. My 'junk' consisted of a library of books on health, spirituality, arts and crafts, medical supplies, the equipment to practice my plethora of arts and crafts (and healing), a few pieces of furniture, and boxes of paperwork. His 'important stuff' consisted of boxes of paperwork, a library of books on guns, airplanes, death, maiming, destruction and espionage, guns and airplane parts, scuba gear, various implements of death and destruction, the heirloom family furniture, and at least ten years supply of dried foods and ammo that would supply a small army (he was a CIA agent and airline pilot).
That was all on top of the more customary household items such as kitchen implements, bathroom necessities, furniture, clothes and food. I insisted on being able to use my possessions, not just visit them on a monthly basis, so we had to get a bigger house. He passed away and I decided to move. I had to deal with all of his stuff as well as my own. The furniture was no problem; relatives and garage sales took care of that quickly. After several of what came to be known as the Garage Sales From Hell, most of his 'important items' and all of the store of dried food was gone. His friends took care of all the implements of death and destruction, which left me free to get rid of as much of my own 'junk' as possible.
The last seven years have consisted of me getting rid of what no longer serves me; or at least trying to. Between family members and friends moving, more extraneous stuff has appeared in my home. Just when I think I have a handle on it and have used up the last of the 27 bottles of very expensive shampoo (which I love but who needs 27 bottles of it waiting around?) someone else unloads a bunch of some other kind of expensive stuff on me. I'm not complaining about receiving some really cool stuff mind you, and I give a large portion of everything away usually. It's just that when your home becomes the way-station of departing friends it can get out of hand.
Like many, I am enough of a pack-rat myself, as evidenced by the 40-plus paper shopping bags full of paperwork that was moved everywhere with me throughout my entire life. When life slowed down to a crawl and I was finally able to go through most of the boxes that had been through move after move with me, more than 40 sacks of unnecessary paperwork hit the recycle bin. That's in addition to the previous 29 from the year before, the shredding of which actually broke my heavy-duty shredder.
You can bet that I feel much better after getting rid of all that paperwork and the boxes it was all in. For one thing, I won't have to cart it all around anymore and I have gotten rid of at least 30 cardboard boxes that were taking up space. The other bonus had to do with all the other boxes I finally had time to look through and reorganize. There were things in there that I wondered why on earth I had thought important enough to save. I plead the "I'm too busy to take time to deal with it right now" excuse. What's your excuse?
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