Clutter

I officially stopped working outside the home two months ago.  I’ve got to say, it’s still somewhat strange not to be under continual stress day in and day out.  That’s not to say that there is no stress in my life, but in comparison to the work-a-day world it’s a world of difference.

I must declare publicly that my husband Chris is my hero.  He has allowed me to stay home and take care of our home and do volunteer work.  He is the one bearing the burden of being the sole income earner of which I am most grateful! 

I am continuing on with cleaning out the clutter in our home.  Each week I focus on closets or drawers and work on throwing away or giving away the endless amount of things that we don’t use or need any longer.  Some of it’s in good shape or has never been used…that’s the stuff we give away.  Some of it just needs to go away.

On a closet I cleaned out last weekend I found hundreds of cards that my husband and I have received.  Cards for whatever reason, at the time, I decided I wanted to hang on to them.  So I’m starting to go through them, one by one and see what I want to keep and what I can get rid of.  Many of them we haven’t looked at for months if not years.  In that respect, I would think that I should be able to throw them away.  But I’m struggling with doing that.

That struggle has been heightened by the passing of friends over the last few years.  I look at the cards and have precious memories of our friends and am comforted by what they wrote.  The cards from people that have passed on are much harder to get rid of.  But in reality, how often do I look at those cards?

So…I’ve been trying to think of a good solution.  What I’ve decided to do is scan the cards that I want to keep.  I’m going to take the scanned picture of the card and message the person wrote and post them to a personal Pinterest board that I’ve created just for cards we’ve received. 

One of the lessons I’m learning from this is that I need to appreciate the people I’m with and hold on to those precious memories.  I need to have a looser grip on material possessions but hold on to friends and memories.

At the end of the day, when I hold on to things I’m just delaying the inevitable.  Perhaps it’s just part of getting older, but I realize that when I die…all those things that I’ve held onto, someone else is going to have to go through and get rid of.  So maybe I need to learn to let go of the clutter day by day.  Accumulate less instead of having to clean out the closets and cupboards every few years.

If anyone has some good ideas on what I should do with the cards and letters, let me know what you’ve done. 

Enough of that…onward and upward and back to cleaning I go.