Use It, or Lose It

In other words… declutter your life.

I just spent the morning preparing my home for the New Year, placing the coins on the windowsill, completing the abundance table, and touching up the Feng Shui elements for luck and prosperity. None of of these items are any guarantee that the year will be better, but I need something positive to hope for.

The past three days I have also been discarding a lot of things, cleaning out my closet and basement. There is one advantage to moving around the world a lot, and that is the discipline of discarding the unused and unwanted. Because of the restricted volume, I was always forced to sort out the things around the house in order to retain only the most essentials. So for the past 30 years I have operated on the motto, if you haven’t touched it or used it in the last year, throw it away. Stop hiding things in the basement or the attic, you are not doing yourself any favours and will sorely regret it when the time comes to sort things out. I learned this the hard way when I sorted out through my parents things and was livid at how much was stowed away in the various rooms. Some of the items should have been discarded a good 20 years ago.

I have a small closet, one that came with the apartment when I moved in last year and own no old clothes to speak of that have been squirrelled away, because most of the items that were not suitable for European climate or no longer fit, were given away. Same with shoes. There is nothing in my wardrobe that I haven’t used in the last six months, and that is the way it should be.

I am so tired of carrying around the ghosts of the past and all the physical and emotional clutter that suffocate me. The theme that governed my life the past 12 months were loss and breakdown. I fail to recall any other year that broke me completely as 2018, and I truly wish and hope that this is the end of this difficult road. It has been a horrible, horrible year, and I cannot but hope that things will change for the better in 2019.

It’s just another New Year’s Eve.