First Time Purging?

Clutter seems to accumulate effortlessly but somehow it requires great effort to de-clutter…unless you are forced to do so in a rather creative way.

I was forced to, when I got up at 5.oo a.m. to a completely flooded house.  Wednesday morning, I got up at 1.30 a.m. thereabout, for some reason I could not go back to sleep. As I laid on my bed, I heard what sounded like rain, so I remained under the covers until it was time to get up to get ready for work, never questioning the legitimacy of my conclusion.  As I swung my legs off the bed, and hopped off the bed, there was a splash and I was standing in almost 2 feet of water!    

As I made my way out of the bedroom I realised that the source of the water flow came from the bathroom.  Immediately my mind started working overtime trying to determine how this catastrophe happened…what did I do or not do. I recalled coming home the evening before to “dry” taps, which it appeared, was the case for most of the day if not all.  I remembered it was the bathroom tap that I opened when I discovered the dried taps, it must have been that I forgot to close the tap back…or maybe I just took for granted that water would not return…

Now routines and habits are a heck of a thing…and those are the shit that my evenings are made of.  There are certain things that I have grown accustom to doing which has become second nature to me.  I never had to consider the consequences those routines and habits would have should something like this happened….not until I had to!

When I get home on evenings, after the usual stuff…eat, shower…relax…I get into my assignments which require me using my laptop…the laptop which I leave on the rug in the living room charging for the next day…get the picture?

Earlier in the week I was on the hunt for my passport, took out my accordion file with all my personal documents and intended to put it back where it belonged but it remained on the rug in the living room too! Yup…

I swept water throughout the entire house for at least 4 hours, had to solicit help to get the rug out the house and furniture removed in order to complete the task at hand.  By the time I was done I threw out four, maybe five bags of rubbish which consisted of bank statements from 2012 all the way to 2015, pay slips for the past four years, receipts for items I brought over the years,  school papers and assignments from secondary school and a few other items I can’t recall.   

I was forced to de-clutter my living space, something I had intended to do, at different times throughout the years but never got around to it….and obviously kept adding to it!  Now that I have, it’s so much clearer and spacious, easy to move around and more pleasing to the eyes. 

Flooded corridor!!!

I am not sure, now that it’s all gone, why I held on to all that crap for as long as I have…they were things that were no longer useful to me or my future, things that no longer added value in any way, things that I out grew over the years, memories that I no longer enjoyed in some cases…but yet I continued to make place for them.

I think that we as humans accumulate things…different things that seem important to us at the point in time; things that are sentimental in nature or just represents an era in our lives…and while that is important, it is also important to remember that every day we experience new things, met new people, create new memories and find new things that represent us or things that become important to us for one reason or the other….if we don’t rid ourselves of the old stuff, the stuff that no longer add value to our lives, we can never have room for the new things that can.

Having de-cluttered my physical space (by force) it’s time to make new memories…experience new things!