ohbloodyhell8

The other day I attended a lovely holiday shindig.  The home was extremely clean and tastefully decorated.  Yet there were very few items that seemed to possess sentimental value.  The house had no clutter anywhere.  Even the storage spaces were tidy and organized.  I realized if the owner of this house came into my house she would think she had walked into an episode of Hoarders.  So I began to wonder if my “hoarding” is connected to something.

The things in my house are hard to get rid of because I feel an emotional connection to them.  Yet I know I don’t want to keep many of these things for a long time only to then throw them away.  But I don’t want my home to feel sterile.  When I was younger, some of my friends’ houses seemed that way, like nothing in it belonged to them or meant anything to them.  How do I figure out what is crap, if you’ll pardon the expression, and what truly has value, enough to keep?

Then my thoughts wandered to my quest for simplicity and how the clutter simply does not work with simplicity.  And really, do I need the “things” that remind me if the memories?  I stopped saving every movie ticket stub years ago, yet after seeing The Muppets with my sons I find it difficult to throw those stubs out.  It’s not like I won’t have the memory of the theater experience without the tickets and they don’t really help me remember anything except the day and time we went-but I don’t actually care about that-I care about the smiles, the laughs, and the conversations we had that day.  So no, I don’t need the stubs.  I don’t need the cards, the ribbons, the stuff.  I keep the memories in my heart.

Life would be so much simpler without the stuff.  I will be off from work next week for the holiday and will be the queen of purge.  The quest for simplicity without sterilization continues.