Decluttering and Quarantine

It's Tuesday morning...

I have to work at 2:00. My thoughts are continually on the act/art/effort of decluttering my house. I seem to shift things from one room to another or from one bag to another. The front desk area of my house is full of bags of donate-able items and cast offs from my kitchen purge of last weekend. Clothes are hung on the back of chairs to be given to daughter's and/or given away. There are three or four (I've lost count) of the number of bags of clothes that are in quarantine in my studio. (Quarantine: putting things in bags or boxes and setting them aside for 3 months. If you don't need them in three months you probably aren't going to need them.) I am continually going through my closet and trying to only keep those things that "bring me joy". This last mantra "Keep only what brings you joy" was gleaned from the book by Maria Kondo. "the life-changing magic of tidying up - the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing" She states in her book that one must not try and organize until one has completely decluttered their "space". I am not sure if I will ever get around to organizing then. What is this attachment that we have to our things? We are not our things. We cannot take our things with us. Do our things actually define us? Do they become part of us in a way that we cannot understand? I don't know. I don't think so but then what does one really understand about themselves anymore?  I don't get it. But I'm trying very hard to overcome the need to have so much. It's hard working where I work as far as clothes go....always something new coming in...always something new that I want. That's the hard part to fight against. I can always convince myself, and easily I might add, that I need this or that. The hard part is to say and believe and act on the fact that I don't need it.

When my mother was 70, she said to me, "I don't know what I want to do with my life." I thought at the time, "Well, if you don't know now Mother, you may never know." She never did. She lived the rest of her life making her daughter's upset and angry with her which alienated three of them, annoying the people that she lived with, getting herself kicked out of one living place and ending up in a psychological hospital for the umpteenth time in her life. She lost all of her good jewelry somewhere (she claims it was stolen) and died alone, pretty much at her own hand. Not directly but she died because she wouldn't do what she was told to do. A real lesson for me. I said all that to say, "I don't know what I should do with my life either." I'm only 61 so I guess I have a few years....

later...........