Friday, February 3, 2012

Moving forward with life after sixty…

I linked to a a post from Facebook this morning by Barbara Hannah Grufferman about decluttering your life after fifty, and it started me thinking about the things that I hold on to, and how they clutter my life.  And here I am, past sixty and I still struggle with decluttering.

For me, it’s clothes.  I have tubs of size ten clothes, mostly jeans and capris that has been cluttering my life for years now.  It’s a lot of clothes, too, because at that size was shopping was fun. 

But that was ten years ago, and I will never be that size again, and even if I was, the clothes would be so outdated, so why do I hold on to them?  Is it because I need the affirmation that I really wore them?  It’s not like I ever take them out and look at them, so who knows, but it’s time to throw them in the trash.  A start to that decluttering.

My closet is full of clothes I never wear.  I live in yoga pants and jeans, I seldom dress up, I detest it, so why do I have these clothes hanging in my closet?  It’s time to declutter and get rid of a lot of things.

It’s such a wonderful feeling when your world is organized.  There is a saying that when you live in clutter, you live in chaos.  Well, everything in my world, thanks to hubby is organized, the man is a whirlwind.  And for as much grief as I give him about throwing things away, I’m really grateful, because he makes our life so simple.  He’s constantly going through the refrigerator, throwing away leftovers, he straightens the cabinets, he organizes drawers, he immediately pitches junk mail, it never comes in the house, he trashes it in the garage, and it does make things flow so much smoother.

The only thing he stays away from are my computers, my closet and my makeup, hence the clutter. And yes, the files on my computers are cluttered, well do a degree, they aren’t nearly as bad as they were a few years ago.  It just goes against my nature to do things in an orderly way, and I wish I had an organized mind, but I don’t, but I’ve learned a few things along the way.  I can’t handle things out of place in my house, a messy kitchen drives me wild, so I’ve learned to compensate for my unorganized mind.  I make myself put things away immediately when I use them, as I’ve said before, I work in the sink to avoid messes in the kitchen, I fluff the sofa pillows of a morning, I do a quick walk thru.  It doesn’t take long, and I’m finished, ready for whatever the day brings.  I’ve learned that procrastinating is worse than doing something and getting it over with, and of course I still procrastinate, most of us do, but I have learned for the most part to just push through and get it over with.

But in the back of my  mind, always is the thought that I need to declutter that closet, and dump those clothes.  I think I don’t do it because there won’t be anything left.  I seriously do wear 10% of my closet, and if I get rid of all the things I don’t wear, it will be pretty bare.  But I’m not procrastinating about this, I’m just holding on to the old, because I can’t face walking into my closet and seeing empty shelves, instead of looking ahead to the new.  And I’m not even going to start talking about buying new clothes, and how the manufacturers are missing the boat by not designing cute clothes for women in our age group, my friends and I complain constantly about this, and how we seldom find anything that we just love.  And a lot of it is due to the fact that we’ve not only grown older, we’ve grown wider.  But I won’t go there, not today, I’ve got enough to worry about with the decluttering.

A little reflecting going on in Heavensville this morning, but I seriously am going to declutter my world a bit this spring, I just have to get up the nerve to do it…

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