Shedding it all.

Its been a busy week of lightening loads. A little while ago an overwhelming need to purge my home of "stuff" came over me. When I told my husband what I wanted to do he said, "We don't have 'stuff'. We don't have big screen TVs and a thousand electronic gadgets to get rid of." This is true, but we do seem to have a collection of lots of little odd things and so off I went. I started in our bedroom and I managed to pack up 4 bags of old clothes for charity, another three of damaged clothes, old magazines, broken things never to be fixed and more. I packed up boxes of books too, which is accomplishment since I usually feel I must keep EVERY book I read. After all that I realized that was just ONE room! I'm now imagining how light I'm going to feel after doing the whole house, room by room.

Two interesting things have arisen during this process. First, I've realized that my husband is a far worse offender than I am when it comes to poor house keeping skills and being a pack-rat. I found receipts in his dresser from before we were married, boarding passes from our honeymoon, t-shirts that he owned when we first started dating in the late 1990's, old glasses, and on and on it went. I don't think the poor guy knew what hit him when he saw what I'd done, but out with the old and in with the fresh!

The second interesting event is that somehow this load lightening has re-motivated me to return to my original goals when I set out blogging. So, all excuses aside I dragged my tired, head-aching body to the gym last night and managed to find the energy to stay for an hour of cardio. I'm intrigued by this idea of the impact your physical environment has on your mental and physical state of being. Any time I've heard people talk about how de-cluttering or altering their home and surroundings changed their life entirely I secretly think to myself, "That's a load of crap!" while I politely grin and nod. But now I'm starting to wonder. I'm wondering if living in chaos has been so overwhelming for me that I've just let everything else get out of control too.

I know you are now thinking I'm some kind of hoarder or that I live in filth which is far from the truth, but I'm not great at putting things away and there are a thousand other things I'd rather do than organize toys, fold laundry or sort through old books and magazines; and as a result things get shoved in closets or put in Rubbermaid bins under beds. The trouble with this is all these things eventually become mountains of "stuff" that we don't need, don't use and eventually forget we have. So, I'm purging my house and in a surprising turn of events my life. I'm looking forward to seeing the final outcome...only trouble is it took 2 days to do the bedroom so by my calculations it might take 12 days to do the whole house and another 3 or 4 for the garage. Add to that my impending return to work and being a mommy, it might take a lifetime to get it all done!!! ;-)

But....it will be worth it!