Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,28
them for kindling!”
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Trash/Recycling
The things that neither you nor anyone else needs to keep will represent, I suspect, about 15 percent of the stuff in your home.
This is the bag containing a handful of moldy grass seed from 2 years ago, the lone sock, the storage container without a lid, the stack of coffee-stained newspapers or magazines, and the pile of cleaning rags in the laundry cupboard. Trash is the clutter that accumulates—and perhaps even reproduces—under the sink, in the backs of closets, and in the other dark and overlooked crevices in your home.
If it clearly looks like trash, it goes in the trash/recycling pile as you’re downsizing. If you keep saying “no” when you try to put it into another category, it also goes in this pile. (“Is this a Memory or an I-Might-Need-It Item? Does anyone else want it? Can I sell it?”) Malignant items go in here, too.
So that’s the quick-and-easy process of determining what you’ll take and how to distribute the rest. Not so hard, is it?
Now, let’s discuss how to pull out the treasures from your Memory Items pile and ensure that you’re bringing the proper amount.
X MARKS YOUR TREASURES
The treasures in your home are like trophies that the world has given you over the years. However, these aren’t the kind of trophies that kids get just for showing up. These are, to continue the metaphor, the trophies you’d get for winning a state championship. These are your very own Olympic medals.
Your treasures commemorate the most loving, memorable, and triumphant moments in your life. They most strongly capture the essence of the most important people who are now gone (like grandparents, special great-aunts, a departed spouse) and those who have moved away (like grown kids or best friends).
Here’s a good rule of thumb: If something makes you smile, fills you with joy, brings back a great memory, and makes your heart sing when you look at it, then chances are high it’s a treasure. If not, it likely isn’t.
Treasures aren’t all your favorite items from all your family vacations. They’re the best items from the best vacations—the ones that most vividly bring back the most meaningful memories of traveling with your loved ones. Treasures aren’t a shelf of papers you wrote and books you read during grad school—they’re the most important paper and the most important book.
When you have multiple copies of a similar thing—all your child’s spelling tests, all your grandmother’s quilts, all your stuffed animals from your own childhood—then one of them is going to be the most meaningful to you. Maybe it’s the highest quality, or it was most important to the person who created it, or you simply have a vividly pleasant memory from the day you received it tucked away in your brain.
But if you continue to keep all the others that aren’t so special, you lessen the value of the best one. It’s hard to locate among the crowd of runners-up. If this thing is so special, why diminish it? Why not elevate it to the place it deserves?
Our natural tendency is often to see everything in a home as important, whether we’re downsizing our own home or dealing with the items that belonged to a parent or someone else we loved. But I can tell you that when everything is important, nothing is important.
Bringing too much, or filling your home with the items collected during another person’s life, will weigh you down and fill you with sadness. Having more treasures will not bring a person back, nor will it help you relive an earlier stage of your life. You’ll simply feel suffocated and mournful—and that is not how treasures should make you feel.
Each treasure should commemorate a specific memory, event, or person. As you decide whether or not an item deserves to go onto the treasure pile, ask yourself: “Is this memory, event, or person truly deserving of being honored with one of my limited allotment of treasures? If so, is this the best item I can use to honor this memory, event, or person?”
However, don’t start this process with the object. Don’t look around at the items in your home and figure out how you can turn them into treasures by attaching memories, events, and people to them. Instead, take the opposite approach: Come up with a list of the “bests, greatests, and mosts” in your life, then find the treasures that serve as reminders of them.
In the Let It Go exercise that follows, I’ll provide