No Vacancy
Several years ago, my husband and I decided it was time to sell our “starter home” and move up to a larger property. Now, every good HGTV watcher knows how important it is to de-clutter your house in order to make it more appealing for potential homeowners. Through this de-cluttering process, one is supposed to take away all personal items that can detract from people seeing the home itself and instead focusing on the personality or likes and dislikes of the people currently living there.
So, like all good students, we followed directions and got rid of all of our “extra stuff.” We paired down to only the essentials and stripped away a lot of the “us” that was decorating the place we’d lived for the past 7 years. I have to be honest; this was a really hard exercise. Every book, every photo, every little scrap of paper that had some sort of memory attached to it was boxed up and put into a storage unit. While we were packing away these things we both would comment about each item and reminisce about the story behind it or why we needed to keep it. We spent hours if not days agonizing and fearing how would we live without all this “stuff” we usually have surrounding us?
Well, fast-forward several months. We ended up not selling at that time and having to go and “reclaim” all of our treasured boxes out of storage. Here is what I discovered: We’d spent hundreds of dollars to store this “stuff” these “things” that after a few months had been forgotten about as we planned to move on in our journey. To be honest, we never even looked in most of those boxes again once they were brought back into our lives.
It got me thinking. What else am I holding onto in my life: a belief about myself or someone else, an event that had a negative impact that stopped me from moving forward, a “what if?” It’s all just “stuff” that is costing me valuable space in my mind. “Stuff” that, while it helped shape me in some way, is probably best just tossed.
So I ask, you this: Is your storage unit full? If so, what’s in it? Can it use a good cleaning out?
Melanie
