I just read a news article quoting new research that determined clutter is stressful.
Really? How much time and money did you spend figuring that out?
While my blogging partner, Anita, is trying to figure out what lifetime memories she should keep and what to do with the rest, I’m still trying to understand how I manage to collect so much stuff in the first place.
I feel a little like the kid named Pigpen from the Peanuts comics. He’s the dirty kid with a perpetual cloud of dust surrounding him. Wherever I go I seem to be in a pile of stuff, especially paper.
Paper collects on my desks at home and work. They gather on the floor and under the seats in my car. They boil out of the glove box: years of expired tire warranties and Taco Bell napkins.
I can’t even bring myself to sit down at my desk at home surrounded as I am by notes, receipts and stacks of paid bills I haven’t had the energy to file.
All around me are boxes of pictures I intend to scan and keep, just like Anita was talking about. That sounds easy enough except that I have sixty-some years worth and that doesn’t even count the thousands of pointless pictures I’ve taken since my phone became my camera.
I have little boxes here and there filled with stuff I don’t know what to do with. Some of it is unidentifiable – all the stuff I have no use for but am afraid to throw away.
And now we have the research confiming — clutter is stressful.
I’m going to add that article to the shredder pile I’m slowly collecting. It’s not big enough to deal with yet.