A week or so ago I was talking with a coworker who is relocating to California. I asked if he had a lot of stuff to move and he said that he didn’t, in part because of exercise of throwing all your possessions on the floor, picking up each item and asking yourself if it brings you joy. If not, out it goes. This activity is from the book  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. This conversation came up at the same time we’ve been trying to declutter our basement at home.

The basement has become a graveyard for items that we rarely use. My stepson Matthew recently moved to a smaller place and graciously has allowed us to store the extra stuff he can’t fit in or use now. My stepdaughter Kristina moved across country taking the bare minimum leaving us with the bulk of her worldly possessions. This is all on top of the fact that a few years ago their mom moved and gave them all their stuff from her house that she didn’t want to take. Guess whose house it’s in now?

While I haven’t read the book nor will I, I get the idea of it. Problem is, while I have tons of saved junk, I’m not that attached to it. If I cleaned out my clothes closet and only saved those pieces of clothing that bring me joy, I’d have only a sweatshirt and pair of jeans left to wear.The stuff in boxes downstairs – sure I like seeing it but if it disappeared, I’d be ok. So why is it so hard to declutter?

I think the first issue is always believing someone can “use” it. All the old arts and crafts stuff? It’s still good – I’m sure someone can use it. The old toys that the kids have outgrown and probably have no sentimental value to them – someone would love playing with those toys. So, it gets saved until we can find the right user. That user never seems to appear.  Then there’s the issue of getting rid of old items. You can’t just throw out an old vacuum, that needs to go to the dump. That takes a special trip. I’d rather watch TV. There’s also the fact that not all charities want your old stuff. Some don’t take books. Others don’t want furniture. It’s hard to be charitable.  There’s also the “we can fix that” lie we tell ourselves. This accounts for the bike cemetery in the garage. We’ll fix those bikes up and give them to charity. That never happens either. Good intentions though. That counts for something, right?

We did manage to do two runs to both the dump and Goodwill and another charity over the last two weekends. I unearthed a box of stuff from my childhood and luckily for my sister, I might send her some of it to enjoy. There’s still a ton of stuff to go through. Lots of pictures, back from the day when you actually had the film developed and half the pictures were terrible but you still kept them. I need to take a week of vacation to sort through them all.

My joy will not be in the possessions left behind but the lack of them. Maybe that’s the point of the book or I can write my own decluttering book when I finish the basement. Should be a bestseller in, oh, 2025.