Signs of hoarding

He is not satisfied with his blue dog, but must also stand guard over Lucy's favorite red ball.

Little shit.

Speaking of hoarding, Jason and I have been getting rid of lots of junk lately. Including boxes of stuff that we moved from Parkland. . . to our first apartment in downtown Tacoma. . . to Waltham, Massachusetts . . . to Arlington, Massachusetts . . . back to Waltham . . . and then to Bainbridge. I read this book review the other day (I haven't ordered the book yet), but I just loved the message:

It's All Too Much, By Peter Walsh

I moved to California hauling a lot of boxes still unopened from at least two previous purges of epic proportions. Sound at all familiar?

It's All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to "organize" all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place. Does it reflect a fantasy waistline or a long-abandoned career? What about this "priceless" relic of a late loved one that's been sitting in a moldy trash bag for 10 years? Be honest: what place do these things have in the life that you imagine for yourself? Because, if the stuff you accumulate isn't actively helping get you closer to a life you truly want, then it's getting in the way, and it needs to go. Period.

The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by "organizing" stuff I don't want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love - it's not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning. For me, this is about the opposite of organizing; it means disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating whether it's making my family's life better today. And if some heirloom really is precious to me, can I find a better home for it than a shelf in the back of my garage?

You can't believe how emotionally complex this process is for a craphound like me, but once I get started, it's completely exciting - the illusion that all this junk is making me happy melts away with every scrap of paper or broken piece of equipment I can get out of the way.

That's been this book's revelation for me: this is about calculating the very real cost that clutter incurs every day, then deciding what you can tolerate _not_ doing about it. The mindless junk of your past crowds out opportunities and sets pointless limitations. Move out the junk, and you create room for the rest of your life. Ultimately, it's not just a question of tidying your house; it's a question of liberating your heart.