So, OK, you’re iced in again. Your downward sloping driveway is a sheet of ice. You can’t get to your mailbox or even pick up your morning newspaper as it sits half way up the driveway in its yellow wrapper. You feel like you are in a endless rewinding time warp, like Bill Murray in the movie, “Groundhog Day.” Everyday is the same: up at 7:30 after nine hours of sleep; you put your teeth in and head for your first cup of coffee standing by to be dunked into by your habitual three fig bars. You read your devotionals and next week’s Sunday School lesson. You do the cereal thing with the AllBran and frozen blueberries swimming in Vanilla flavored Almond milk. Now what?
It is too icy to get to your hobby room underneath the back porch. No newspaper to read. TV, of course is always an option but this too creates its own set of problems of back ache and headache from listening to all the mindless chatter invading your dulled brain. Reading your Kindle works for about one hour before your eyes start to smart from strain. Now what?
Isn’t there something you can find to do that is constructive, that has a value? And then suddenly out of the blue, some things that have been out of sight and/or out of mind for years, mysteriously come into your focus: the BOXES in the attic! The BOXES in the guest bedroom closet! The BOXES in the basement! All he miscellaneous BRIC-A-BRAC that occupies the tops of every table in the house! The BOOKS – read or unread – that fill bed headboards and bookcases! All the JUNK that is shoved into cabinet drawers and shelves! In short, you now see all the ACCUMULATED CLUTTER that you live in! And now, this gives you something to do that has a value while you are ice bound for who-knows-how long!
If you don’t believe me that your own house is filled with a choking amount of clutter, just open a few cabinet doors and see what you have shoved in here. Check out your closets and look at all the stuff you haven’t worn or put on in the last five, ten, or even twenty years. Don’t tell me you don’t have boxes in your attic and crawl spaces. Of course, it’s there and has been there for a long time, all the while you have meant to deal with this mountain of obsolete, unwearable, – even never used – stuff and junk – and ship it off to Wear and Share or the Re-cycling Center! But the axiom of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”, has controlled you up to this point but now, Today!, with an endless amount of time at your disposal, you can begin the long overdue process of “Shedding.”
While on this journey of de-junking, or shedding, you will learn some very interesting truths about yourself. You will discover, for example, how impulsive you have been in the past in spending your money. You will find yourself asking,”Why did I ever buy this?” You will learn how sentimental you are as you weigh what things of your parents and children to pitch or keep. You will expose how materialistic you might be when deciding what to keep or donate, even if the item will never be used by you.
Many of your decisions will be age-related. A younger person will hang on to something like cross country skis brought here some ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago just in the slimmest of chances, that enough snow will fall here so that he can give it a go. An older person who couldn’t go ten feet on a ski now, is much more willing to pass these on.
Another challenge found in shedding is what to do with valuable stuff that you have no room for – like your mother’s set Copeland Gainsborough Spode China. This is beautiful stuff and is way too valuable to ship off to Wear & Share. You have your own Lennox china from your days as a bride; your daughter’s got her dinnerware as well. You have no place to put the stuff except back in the corrugated box that has been its home in your attic for the past twenty years.
Because this shedding journey turns out to be a very complicated psychological mishmash, it deserves the scrutiny of the famed Professor Ignatz Smedley who will explain everything to us next week.