I recently led a thought session on nonattachment (or nonexcess), a common translation for aparigraha which is the fifth yama. The yamas are the first step of yoga (the shapes you may think of as yoga are the third of the eight steps) and are yoga philosophy’s first five guideposts for living. Yama translates as restraints, however the interpretation I love and live by is that offered by The Art of Living as this: “they almost primarily focus on our actions when in community with others while the niyamas focus more generally on our relationship with our physical and psychological selves.” Each of the five yamas each have at various times in my life offered guidance in different ways, and this time as I perused the ideals underlying nonattachment I really got to thinking about the excess that is prevalent in my life. Looking around I could see clearly how all the things I was keeping (a sign of attachment to them) becomes excess time spent on those things and ends up feeling like a lot of excess energy misdirected.
Inspired by my own talk on this yama, I returned home and set up my own little challenge – to get rid of 100 things a day. I did not intend for it to be all big physical things, although the idea of a nearly empty house does hold some appeal for me, but rather an exploration of places I have excess and things I am holding onto for no known reason. I have a computer with 2 terabytes of storage, and it is almost full. Same with my phone, which is mostly filled up with over 12,000 photos. I have closets that are well organized and yet stuff that don’t quite fit in overflows into the corners of my office. I have an attic and garage that hold countless things that are untouched in the three years we’ve lived in this house, and I can’t tell you the number of years before that. The signs of attachment and excess are everywhere in my life, and I no longer want most of it.
I recently looked at a random decorative item that I didn’t really want anymore but felt called to keep because it’s a perfectly good thing. I wondered to myself if I had realized that day at the store that me and this item were entering a 20+ year relationship where I solemnly swore to keep it dusted, clean and cared for? I assure you I did not consciously enter that relationship, but I am ready to consciously leave that relationship.
I chose 100 things because it is a significantly big enough number to notice doing it each day, but I don’t think it is unreachable every day given the pure volume of things around me. A wild statistic often quoted is that the average American home has 300,000 items and sometimes I think I might be above average. If that number is anywhere near correct (are we counting each screw in the garage?) and if my home is average, and I got rid of 100 items every day for a year – my home would still have 263,500 items left – I would have cleared out 1 in 10 items, hardly a dramatic situation. And even if you don’t think my home (or yours) has that many physical things… that estimate doesn’t include what I know for a fact is hundreds of thousands of digital items existing on that one ONE physical item known as ‘my computer’. If e-mails were letters that arrived in my mailbox, or if every photo I took was a 4×6 print in an album, my home would be completely overwhelmed.
Final notes on how I’m counting. Many things that are excessive in my life are tiny, and only become excessive in bulk. For clarity – I’m counting it as a singular item if the item reasonably has its own utility or purpose. If I have a stack of papers to sort through, each page is an item – but a book is not 343 items.
Note: The below was written and is updated as it unfolds. Please bookmark this page if you want to follow along!
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3/27/23 Day 1– 100 physical things. No problem. I came home super motivated and easily rounded up 100 things to either go to donation or recycling. I went through each room and grabbed a few things. Question – why do I keep so many empty cardboard boxes? Other than those, today was a mix of a few kitchen items, some clothing, a few books, and too many small things to list. These were all good condition items that I donated to appropriate local charities. This type of action also aligns with the third yama: asteya or non-stealing. When I hold onto something that could be well used elsewhere this is a form of stealing from the item’s utility, and a form of stealing by keeping it from a person who may really need it. I also went a bit above and beyond because there was something I wanted to store under my bed and in figuring out how to do that (it’s a sleigh bed without easy access to that space) I ended up cleaning a disturbing amount of dust out from under the bed and rotating my mattress. So today also ended up a bit in the first of the Niyamas – soucha, cleanliness or purity. Keeping where I sleep clean feels good. And now I’m pondering, can I count that dust as one the 100 items?
3/28 Day 2 – 100 digital photos. I have 12,000 photos just on my phone so 100 was nothing. I got to 100 just going through a folder of old screen captures I didn’t need anymore. These were mostly confirmation numbers, old ticket qr codes, random things I needed to share with someone, and not things I meant to still have a month (or a year) later. I also sorted about 15 subfolders into 8 folders for now because the old folders weren’t needed anymore. This little pocket or organization means it will be just a tiny bit easier to find the things I do need in that space.
3/29 Day 3 – 100 flower bulbs. I thought I was going to plant 100 bulbs, but they had been in the garage too long waiting for me to do something. So that was a bust, but at least they aren’t in the garage anymore. I recycled the paper bags they were stored in and let the little dried husks be mixed into the dirt of my new planting area, following my original intention of planting them even though I very clearly won’t get the reward of the flowers.
3/30 Day 4 – 100 emails. Like the digital photos of two days ago this was ridiculously easy and took maybe 5 minutes. I can repeat this one a bunch more times and had to stop myself from doing more. I did not stop because I am saving them for another easy day. I stopped because my goal is to ensure this is a very small, easy to fit in part of my day. At only 4 days in I know I am still building this habit and consistency is the most important part for long term success. According to a 2021 study it can take about 59 days for a new practice to become a habit (not the 28 we’ve all been told) and my personal experience has taught me that when I go all in on something I tend to be all-out well before those two months have passed. And guess what? Practicing this way is in line with the fourth yama brahmacharya, which translates in most modern interpretations to moderation or my favorite: right energy. Deleting only 100 e-mails when I could have done more so I could move on to other things was the right use of my energy today. Going down a rabbit hole of email deletion would have meant something else I wanted to do would not have happened.
3/31 Day 5 – 100 mixed items. I’m getting the hang of this and so when I popped into the attic to get my spring wreath out, I took five minutes to look though a bag in the attic and donated 56 easter things that can find new life outside of my garage. I kept plenty, but honestly had to ask myself how many Easter baskets one person needs? And with Easter just around the corner I donated them today so they have the best chance of being used this Easter by some other family who will love them (see day 1, asteya). I also got rid of 7 digital notes from my notes app, 27 more emails, and some well past their prime in my fridge to round out the 100. Double yuck to a few of the jars of things that were in the door of my fridge that might have been there for years and had become unintentional science experiments.
4/1 Day 6 – 100 dental pics. I opened a drawer first thing this morning and found a pack of 100 dental picks that I bought a few months ago and they were the wrong kind. I can’t use them, I can’t return them, I can’t donate them, so I shoved them in a drawer as if they might in the darkness somehow become a thing I would use. Sorry not sorry, they are gone. Since I knew I used one, I added a book I finished last night to the donation pile.
4/2 Day 7 – Today was a hodge podge and probably not 100 items. I put a tablecloth on the table and decided I don’t even like it clearly marking it as time to donate it. 1 down, 99 to go. I cleared out some more emails and a few more photos but forgot to count them. I worked in the yard, but that didn’t involve getting rid of anything except some emotional angst that had bubbled up. It’s gone now, but how does one count or measure that? I vacuumed out my car which added a few things to the recycling, a few to the trash, and led to a lot of good feelings about clean, tidy spaces. Do I count the dust and hair and dirt that are gone? As I do with my gratitude practice, I release the idea that this challenge must be perfect and exact every day. I feel really good about moving forward in a lot of ways today.
4/3 Day 8 – A stack of papers that I need to shred lives in a pile on TOP of the shredder. So easy Monday… I’m off to shred 100 or so sheets and get them out of here. It would be simple to say I’m going to shred the whole stack, so I’m working to remember my goal is to keep this habit going by not making it a big commitment. I’m about to find out for sure, but I’m relatively sure the stack only exists because the shredder needs to be emptied, and that small obstacle at some point felt like something I didn’t have time for and so I set the papers on top for “later” then the next time I did the same thing until the whole thing became a big task. I’m just here to unwind that back into the small tasks it would have been at the start (update: 100% yes, the shredder was needing to be emptied.)
4/4 Day 9 – Off to a promising start I woke up thinking about what a good 100 would be for me to focus on today. This set me up for a great day focused on sending/giving things to other people. I have a few greeting cards to mail (I’m old school like that) and a couple of Malas to finish for people and get sent out and it’s time for my yoga of connection club mail. I’m tempted to count all of that because it is getting things out of my house, but today I’m not including them because greeting cards, the malas, and my fun mail outs are really a regular revolving inventory situation and not a permanent storage story. So I decided that the pile of papers waiting to be shredded is still a stupid pile to have in my house, so another 100 sheets are gone, and I emptied the shredder again so I’m a step ahead for next time 🙂
4/5 Day 10 – Low hanging fruit. I ended up working all day, to the point where I remembered what a great idea it is that I keep spare leggings in the car because I didn’t even have time to change before my two evening yoga classes. So my bigger goals dwindled to deleting 100 pictures from my phone, and pondering the balance of deleting vs taking photos Although this is the second time I’ve deleted 100 photos, I’m only 100 photos down from where I started on my phone because apparently I’ve also taken about 100 photos in the last week. Food for thought is that “holding steady” at this number of digital images is its own challenge. This wasn’t an issue if the time of film cameras, but what does carefree digital consumption look like down the line?
4/6 Day 11 – 15 items to an appropriate local charity felt good, and I didn’t even have to leave my office to find that many items. And that was it. I meant to shred some things when I got home, and I didn’t. So it goes.
4/7 Day 12 – I decided to make up for the 85 items I shorted yesterday and set a goal to delete 185 photos. In part this is easy, and in part I’m still deep in thought about the photo issue. This growth problem occurs in all realms of my digital world but most notably in pictures and I can’t be alone in this. It’s not better once the photos get moved to my computer. I have a file folder of photos on my computer that a recent look confirmed has almost 53,000 images – and that only covers 4 recent years of photo taking that averaged about 13k per year or new photos (a ridiculous 35 photos a day on average. The hard drive that holds most of my photos has almost 120,000 images, while another more recent set of photos has another 15k bringing it to a fairly appalling 201,00 photos. Quick math says that if I looked at every picture (including the 12k on my phone) for just 2 seconds each, it would take me 112 hours JUST TO GLANCE AT THEM. Say I wanted to delete half of them (leaving *just* 100,000 photos), deleting 100 images every single day would take me 34 months to reach my goal. Since the odds of me not taking any new photos in those 5 years are pretty much zero, I’d really have to delete an average of 125 or so pictures every day for 5 years to get down to about half my current photos. Honestly, I’m feeling a little disheartened by the digital photo clutter. The first 5 years of my childhood are documented in 2 photo albums that maybe have 150 photos in them and while I might like a *few* more, this is a bit too much. After all this thought, I deleted 1,000 photos and it was surprisingly easy to hit this number on just blurry, duplicate, or mediocre pics. I don’t intend to make this a daily goal, but I do feel a little better.
4/8 Day 13 – I ended up at somewhere near 120 things today, all physical. I cleaned out part of my office closet and found a dozen or so things for the donation pile, sorted through some papers on my desk and sent another chunk of things to the recycling bin, then went to wrap a couple of gifts. I got frustrated because the space where I keep all the gift bags was so stuffed full of what appeared to be every gift bag we have ever received that I stopped right there to clear out that space. From fancy boxes to gift bags in every size I lightened the closet by an appalling 90 items. Not to worry, I somehow still have plenty left… On a side note, in cleaning up my office I officially counted 50 books laying around waiting to be read by me. Books aren’t the worst kind of clutter, but counting the unread ones did get me thinking about why I buy books and don’t read them. (I don’t have an answer to this).
4/9 Day 14 – It’s Easter and I wanted an easy day so I started with clearing a few notes in my notes app, then got sidetracked by saved links on my web browser. Since I’m counting digital things, I went ahead and cleared out many of my web bookmarks to make it a lot easier to get to the things I actually need… and that took care of 60 things links I was keeping. Yes, even things like links count because it is my energy used up every time I scroll to them or through them and I’m focused on reducing that misdirection of energy. I’m feeling the same about old saved e-mails, so another 48 are now gone for a daily total of 115. And then I had a few hours in the car and decided to sort and review more photos – today tackling not the generic ‘camera’ album, but folders of saved items including a folder of well over 300 saved inspirational quotes and images. I love a good inspirational quote on a pretty background so this is not the easy place of regular photos where I possibly took 30 of a butterfly12 images of my sandwich one day, this is things I’ve already saved and moved to their own folder for safe keeping. And I still pretty easily got rid of about half of them, so today’s total was easily 400 items. I’m hosting a retreat that I leave for on Wednesday and I’m happy to have done a bit extra over the past two days as I am not planning on holding this as my priority for those 4 days.
4/9 Day 15 – Still inspired by yesterday I deleted another 100 pictures, easy peasy.
4/10 Day 16 – started strong and had 5 items before 8am, and then the day got rolling and 5 things was the total. I did however have a great in real life conversation about digital photos and one of the women was missing the days when we had just 24 tiny pieces of film that had to last and how careful we wer with them. In part it was the monetary investment – you had to buy the film and then pay to have it processed and prints made. And also there was an element of care, curation, and then the anticipation. You didn’t see vacation pictures until well after the event. Even with one hour photo processing you had to take the film to the place and wait. Digital imagery has given us instant satisfaction which has highs and lows. High – we never miss the shot or find out weeks later someone blinked or it was too dark or blurry. Low – 100,000 images I never look at.
4/11 Day 17 – Still on this thought of digital clutter I though a marker would be nice. My computer (thanks file manager for doing the hard work of counting) has 254,157 files at this moment. Yes, a portion of that number of that might still be software and program files – but I did exclude primary software folders. I did not include anything on the multiple external hard drives I have as those are mostly backups, and I’m acknowledging that my digital clutter situation still has more to consider. Back to what is on my computer right now, I know a huge chunk of it is digital photos (see day 12) and yet it gets clear that pictures are not my only form of digital clutter. Good news, just what I’ve done in 16 days has given me wiggle room on what was a nearly full hard drive. And I’m looking forward to a lot more wiggle room, both digitally and in real life. Took the easy path today and shredded 185 items to balance out yesterday. Do we even need to talk about the fact that I still have more to shred?
4/12 Day 18 – keep it simple – 100 pictures, done.
4/13 Day 19 – 100 pictures, and then a few more which brought me to something I love – an even number. That number in my camera album on my phone is still in my opinion huge at 9,000 but I’m going to try to hold this as a boundary to keep the round number and end with 100’s. So if I take more photos in the day, I’ll delete enough pics to get back to the last round number.
4/14 Day 20 – Holding steady – I’ve taken a bunch of pictures over the last few days, but am holding steady and deleted enough to make space for those and then added the daily100, so now I’m at 8,900. Extra fun today I found a hilarious picture of a friend and promptly sent it to her for giggles. The brief shared back and forth was a beautiful reminder that value of the photo isn’t just the moment of taking it.
4/15 Day 21 – Still pictures while I am out of town, ite remarkable how easy it is to scroll to a random place in my feed and delete. 8,800 pics remain on my phone.
4/16 Day 22 – I almost forgot, but late at night I did it. I actually had to delete over 200 hundred pictures to make up for all the new ones I took today but I am officially at 8,700 pics on my phone.
4/17 Day 23 – I got to about 12 physical things as I wandered around my house (a few clothing items, a few household clutter things) and then had a party to host and that was all for today.
4/18 Day 24 – The party resulted in a lot of pictures, and I wanted to immediately go through them, while there I deleted the 100 required and the ones to make space for the new ones… so I am about 200 pics lighter and now holding at 8,600 pics on my phone.
4/19 Day 25 – It’s weird to consider that I have now gotten rid of 3,500 things (thanks to the day I got rid of 1,000 pics). It hasn’t been hard, and it’s barely made a dent. I don’t notice anything missing. Today was a mix – I added to the physical pile and now have a load of about 70 more things to take to donate. Annnnndddd I opened up my notes app and was just overwhelmed by it so I spent a couple hours going through and ended up deleting about 50 notes (keeping about 15). Some of the info I sorted off into actual files for future reference, and a lot was truly digital clutter – nothing I needed to ever see again, and now I won’t. The extra thing I’ve become more aware of recently is my handling “stuff” as soon as it comes into the house – it feels like I have a lot more motivation to put things away, sort them, recycle them, and just ensure that they reach a final destination in or out of my home so that I don’t have to deal with them again. It’s feeling really interesting.
4/20 Day 26. I started with a pair of leggings that have always been just a little bit big, and now after a decade of use have lost some of their stretchiness. I added two t-shirts (and a few other things) fresh from the laundry that I love in idea but not in fit and feel. Every time I feel like I’ve gone through my clothes as completely as I can I realize there is still so much that I choose to wear that I don’t love. The “why” of this is complex, and at the moment I boil it down to this: As I refined down to just things I love, it was easy to take things that had a big contrast. Things that didn’t fit, weren’t comfortable, or were worn out – that’s easy to clear out. Things that are still in great condition, a pretty good fit, and comfortable enough are harder to pass out of the house. Those feel like I “should” get more value from them. One example is a nearly new shirt that I almost love. *Almost* because it is tight across the shoulders and so it always rides up and I spend what feels like all my time pulling it down. I love it on the hanger, and so I wear it again and then am uncomfortable the whole time.
As I get further into this journey of a 100 I am more aware of these more subtle things and that awareness is guiding me to reevaluate and keep only things that are absolutely yes in all the ways. I rounded out todays hundred with an evaluation of office supplies that I’ve been keeping for so long that when I opened the rubber bands most were dry and brittle and broke as soon as I picked them up. I also got to evaluate (again) how many pens one person needs. And then the day got interesting.
Sitting at my desk I face a bookcase filled with yoga books and a lot of forms of paper I once kept and meant to be placed in scrapbooks. Random keepsakes that once seemed critical are now mostly things that have not stood the test of time. And still these are also things that it is emotionally draining to tackle. A binder of fun ideas that predates Pinterest. A photo album I filled with quotes and inspirational phrases I collected before the days of Facebook and Instagram. Things I know have not all retained any value to me, but still take up space. I sat down ready to clear some space and cleared out hundreds and hundreds of paper things. It might only be a few inches on a book shelf and yet it feels enormous and I do feel lighter. I didn’t keep a tight count, but looking at the recycling pile, and the donation pile, and the trash pile today was easily a 500 item day.
4/21 Day 27 – Another 100 sheets for the shredder. It’s rather embarrassing that I’m still not done shredding the papers that had just been sitting there. Also it feels like a good fay to talk about the fact that I’m not counting handling new stuff that comes in as a part of the 100 going out. I’m trying to hold steady on all those other things – like not letting cardboard boxes pile up and not growing a new mountan of unsorted papers so that I don’t get into this overwhelmed situation again. The result is that like with the photos (now holding at 8,600), often I’m doing far more than the hundred might indicate but not counting it unless it makes a net difference downward.
4/22 – 4/25 Day 28-30 – The weekend got away from me in a blur of long work days. At some point I finally finished the shredding with 76 final pages. I cleared a few things that were WAY past the use by date out of the freezer, and there is another (now seeming everpresent) bag of stuff ready to be donated in my car. And still at the end of Monday I had no clear answer to how many things I had cleared out over the 3 days so at 11:50pm I sat down and deleted just over 300 photos. I’m still in awe of how easy it is. These were on my computer, and it is easier there than on my phone from a functional level – it’s easier to spot the blurry or otherwise mediocre photos on the big screen and it’s easier to hit the delete key than tapping to select the photo then tapping again to delete. This time I was looking at pics from a trip to an animal rescue a few years back. The photos were mostly terrible (ok fine, they were just mediocre photos of animals through fences) but what was even worse is that in trying to capture some magical moment I actually had over 100 pictures of the same tiger clearly taken within the same 2 minutes. And they all sucked. The same thing happened a few minutes later with a bear. The thing is there were a few decent photos – but mixed in with 300 terrible ones the odds are slim that I was ever going to see those good ones. And this is how a lot of things feel for me right now – like I’m constantly spending so much time digging for the good stuff amidst a lot of mediocre stuff.
4/26 Day 31 – Clothes and Shoes. I went to put on pair of my shoes and realized one of them wouldn’t snap and I was completely frustrated that I had for years been keeping these shoes that I couldn’t even wear. So I pulled every pair of shoes off the shelves that I had not recently worn, put them on my feet and walked around for a while. Most of these shoes are at least a decade old and here is what I have now learned. Your shoes will wear out whether you wear them or not. Glue gives out. Fabrics change over time. Things that were once soft on a shoe get stiff. Things that were rigid get soft. All of this makes them uncomfortable or unwearable. I had a few that something in them was no longer stable and I wobbled like a new born giraffe (as it only happened in two pairs of shoes I do have to assume it’s the shoes). Another pair had become so stiff that my foot couldn’t bend in them the way walking usually requires and in those a felt like an angry elephant stomping through the forest. A fair number of shoes were worn out by time alone and it made me sad that I had been saving them for a later that isn’t arriving. Feeling like I had to look at my clothing again in this same way I tackled a drawer or little used clothing items. This is deeper than the Marie Kondo way – touching them and seeing if they sparked joy wasn’t enough, like the shoes I elected to try on each item and see if it felt like joy on. Many things didn’t make the cut. There will be more about clothing and my closet in a post on May 1st. For today, it got late and I didn’t quite finish or get it all counted so the numbers are lumped in with the next day.
4/27 Day 32 – A journey into the outdoor freezer got me started down the thought wormhole of how long we keep things in the freezer. Some make sense – the prickly pear syrup that comes once a year when prickly pears are ripe on my cactus, and the frozen gluten free pie crusts that Trader Joe’s sells during the holidays but I use year round for quiche. Other things I discovered had for sure been in there for years and while they might be safe to eat, that doesn’t equate to them being goooood to eat. So a few things are gone there. Then I got frustrated because like many garages, mine has piles of unused stuff and instead of ignoring it again I decided today was the day to tackle one pile and one set of storage cabinets. So many things went into the donation pile when I looked at them with fresh eyes. Many were put into this cabinet 3 years ago when we moved in and if I had not touched them since they got a very careful re-evaluation. 3 years feels like a good marker of utility, and many hadn’t been used for many years before that but we had been optimistic enough to pack and move them. Now the only place they are moving is to the donation pile. Combining items that were donated, recycled or trash, the total for the last two days was just over 300 items.
4/28 Day 32 – I’m trying not to lose the battle with pictures. My goal of keeping the pics on my phone to 8600 slipped and it took deleting 100 items to get it back to 8,600. So it goes, and today I’m counting that as my 100.
4/29 Day 33 – I am in a constant state in my office of either my desk is clear or my floor is clear. When I need the desk to be clear, I move everything to the floor. When I need the floor to be clear I move everything to my desk. It’s gotten better over the last 32 days AND it is still far from perfect. When I started my floor was covered with tidy, well organized bins and boxes I didn’t even count in what I moved on and off my desk, and much of that has been tackled so I am now really just talking about stacks of papers. And I am desperately trying to get to a place where I don’t have stacks of papers and random that need to be moved back and forth. So today I celebrated finally giving a book to a friend (that I bought for them months ago), clearing out a stack of 31 receipts that have been on my desk for weeks. Note – some I had to keep for tax purposes, but they found a home so I am counting that. I’m also counting some post it notes that got recycled because I did the things I wrote down, samples I went ahead and used so they aren’t on my desk waiting for my attention, and more random papers that I dealt with so they don’t get moved back to my desk (or the floor) again. Total – not an exact count, but somewhere over 100 for sure, and a celebration with a happy dance.
4/30 – 5/5 (Day 34-39) May 1st was the anniversary of the day I turned all my hangers backwards and set a goal of wearing everything in my closet and as I reviewed that challenge, a few more clothing and accessories were donated. See my post here if you want to know more about that challenge). I’m also beginning to understand that because I am tidy, I don’t always look at things that LOOK organized. As this “100 a day” process becomes a more normalized part of my routine I find myself more aware of these spaces. It also helps in seeing it, that the more obvious clutter and junk is gone. Example – The other day in trying to find the supplies I needed to repair a stuffed unicorn I realized I basically had a bin of trash in my closet that was labeled “to sew/to fix”. Let me just say most of what was in there was at least a decade old and if it had actually been important, it would not have been put in a bin for “later”. The entire bin is now gone – fixed, donated, recycled or (my least favorite but still necessary sometimes) trashed (about 150 items for those counting). Another day I pulled out the bin marked “craft supplies” and found it to be a journey down memory lane, in the way that I remembered past projects by the dried up glue, old paint, and random assortment of other useless leftovers. That bin still gets a space on the shelf, but is no longer overflowing and has only still good, useful to me things in it (85 items lighter). No big progress on pictures, but on my phone I am holding at just under 8600. For good measure this week I deleted 300 from my computer on days when not much else had happened towards the 100. I still take a bunch of photos but I delete when I’m bored in waiting rooms or other holding patterns which has helped. I’ve also been on a small gift giving spree. I had a LOT of things around here meant to be gifted and when and where it makes sense I am actually gifting those things. Sometimes I buy gifts for later, and I’ve decided I can actually use my love language of gifts on my people in real time and I don’t have to wait for a hallmark holiday or invitation. First, we never actually know what the future holds. This hit hard when I found a mothers day card I had bought ahead of time. It was distinctly not awesome to find it after my mom passed away. Second, I think this keeping of future gifts feeds off of a scarcity based fear that I have that I won’t have a gift when I need one. I’m ready to release that fear and live with the WILD idea that gifts are never actually required, and that I will in fact be able to find or make something when the time is right.
5/6 – 5/8 Day 40-42. This morning I got a delivery from amazon. As per usual it came in a package with some packing material – those little packs of air. I tend to keep things that I deem useful, so i went to put these air packs with the others and had to pop into the attic to do so, which sent me down a whole path of realizing there is way too much stuff everywhere. With my newly tuned critical eye I briefly looked around the attic, may have used a few swear words, and gathered up an almost obscene amount of these air pockets and let them rain down to the garage floor below. I happened to have two empty plastic bins, and that newly cleared space on top of a cabinet in the garage and I decided that I was only going to keep what fit into the 2 bins that could sit on top of the cabinet. I kept one bin for bubble wrap, and one for the air pockets. The rest could be recycled and that was just over 100 things for the day. Note – these air pockets are typically now marked if they can be recycled as “plastic film” which cannot go into my recycling bin but can go to a special drop off at my grocery store.
While in the attic I also saw more craft supplies. Huge quantities and collections of things I might have one day used (not unlike the very useful air packets) and decided these are a no and are definitely something someone else might love. I’m referring back to that idea of not holding these things hostage. I have clarity on how I want to spend my time going forward and while many things are theoretically useful, they are not useful to me if I have no intended use for them. Three years ago our huge attic was a clean clear space with just holiday décor and moving boxes. Today it’s messy and crammed with more and more stuff that piece by piece has been moved up there to get it “out of the way” which I now realize is the code for ‘I don’t want to decide what to do with it so I’m putting it out of sight’. This process of 100 a day requires a lot of honesty about aspirational items vs actually desired items, and this doesn’t occur just in clothes. Do I want to make the crafty things or do I want to be the type of person who made the crafty thing, or was I once the person who made this particularly crafty things but I no longer am that version of myself and now want different things while not knowing how to release the other things? I’m leaning heavily on that last option as my truth. I didn’t count these collections of very useful things as it is easily five or six hundred items (which I feel is likely to be a low estimate and that’s why I’m not spending my time counting) and so I’m putting the count for these three days at 700 very physical things that no longer take up space in my life.I
6/19 It’s been about six weeks since my last update and I’m still at it. The count of items is a little fuzzy but I can tell you my computer has gained 14 gigs of free space it did not have when I started as I’ve deleted photos that just aren’t good. I’ve held steady on my phone photo count, which means I am constantly deleting as I am constantly taking new ones. One day I decided getting rid of weeds should count, and thousands of them have now been removed from my yard, reclaiming (and claiming) entire planting areas to put in beautiful flowers. As a habit it now looks like this – as I got dressed the other day I put on one of the dresses that did not get worn last year, and remembered that I absolutely loved it. Another day I went through 3 shirts and while I did end up wearing one of them, I didn’t love the way I had to adjust it the entire time I was wearing it and now all 3 are off to find new homes. As I walk through my now delightful garden I pull weeds while they are small and it feels delightful to watch the other plants thrive. I found a few blackberry bushes and now I check daily for a tiny snack of fresh berries. My office, and more specifically my desk, is less covered up, and while harder to count I have released items from my to do list either by doing them, or realizing I am not going to do them. Both are valid. One example would be a recent redo of some large yard art flamingoes that were languishing in rust and mediocrity laying off to the side. It took me two days, but they were scraped, sanded, painted and returned to their former glory – better I think than when they were new. They could have been a two item count to the discard pile, instead I discarded the project from my to do list by getting it done. This may seem like a subtle thing, but not looking around and seeing thing after thing after thing that needs attention is giving my brain space to breath. When I discarded so many things that were stealing my time and my mental bandwidth I found time for creativity. I took a stained glass class and am working on clearing out a corner of the garage to set up a space where I can pursue that. I added a weekly meditative art class to the things I do just for me, and removed things like the pressure to check in here everyday, without releasing the intention of clearing things from my life that aren’t serving me. I have cleared things I no longer wish to read from saved lists of books, things I no longer wish to watch from ‘watch later’ lists, and started paying more attention to money I was spending on things I don’t even want. My amazon “saved for later” list had bubbled up to over a hundred items and I cleared many of them. It’s funny how something can feel like a must have and yet with a little time it is really a “meh”.
It’s been a quieter journey lately, but an incredibly deep one. Know that I am still pursuing getting rid of 100 things a day, and it does still result in regular trips to charities, recylcing centers, and the compost bin. I’ve still been clearing excess from many places – like my food pantry, though that is harder to measure because its more about eating the stuff and not replacing the back stock that had bubbled up with lingering pandemic fears of enoughness. And so today the list is more like the 4 small packs of cous cous from the pantry, two books from a pile I had forgotten existed, 6 things I don’t actually want removed from my amazon shopping cart, a handful of weeds pulled, a few old to-do lists recycled, photos deleted that I took to share but don’t need to keep.
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