Give It Time....It's A Process.

It takes time to de-clutter one's life. How long did it take you to accumulate all that stuff? If your anything like me and my wife, it was years and years. We still have boxes from our wedding 12 years ago! Just sitting there taking up room. So after all these years of building up how can you expect to de-clutter it all in a weekend.

Where is this coming from you ask? Well after spending hours on the weekend clearing stuff out, throwing away what was garbage and putting up for sale some of the items we thing are worth trying to sell off, I still see such a mess! In fact I made more of a mess trying to clean up that mess! I moved stuff out into the basement hallway, piled things up here and there and that storage room floor is a write off!

But, I see now that it's going to take time. Lots of time and I'm willing to spend that time to better organize and de-clutter my home and life. I looked around that room this morning after getting out of the shower and I was feeling bad that I didn't get it all straightened up at once but just a little while ago I realized that it's a process this de-cluttering.

It takes time.

Chris.

No Right Or Wrong Way......

I don't believe there is a right or wrong way to begin to de-clutter ones life. I think for my home a gradual peeling away of the layers is going to work best. It's not just myself that needs to de-clutter, it's my wife and both kids as well. If it were just me, it would be fairly quick and painless. A great purge.

I have to be more sensitive to my families feelings and work more slowly towards this goal. I'll lead by example and start to purge my own clutter. I am far from innocent in the clutter problem here! I have years of books, sheet music, computer parts and clothes to go through.  Don't even Ask about my tools!

Thursday evening I broached the subject with my wife, the wrong way! It lead to a rather heated discussion that did not end well. Friday evening, I appologized for my poor delivery of the message I was trying to convey and we had a good adult discussion about de-cluttering our home. It will begin this weekend with our closet and the spare room in the basement,  or as I call it.......the disaster room!

This could be an eye opening weekend to just how much unessessary stuff we have.

Chris

Minimalism and Simple Living

I have discovered Minimalism. This means many different things to many different people. To me this means de-cluttering my life, cutting back on the "things" I own and getting down to what I need to live and be happy. It means living deliberately. Thinking twice or thrice before making a purchase and bringing another "thing" into my life. I want to live with "passions" not "possessions".

Does this mean that I plan to give away all my stuff and live in an empty home? No, not at all. It just means that I'm going to think long and hard about whether or not I really need that next purchase or is it just a passing fancy that will end up in a box at the back of a closet.

I began the process of de-cluttering my life at work yesterday. I managed to remove well over half of the "stuff" from my office. Things I never use and are not required to do my job. I have opened up so much space in my office and taken away that closed in feeling. Very liberating. I'm not finished in the office but I am so close.

My next de-cluttering project is going to be my home office. I'm a photographer as well and I have a lot of old stuff that I never use. Some that I have never used because it ended up not being what I wanted or what I thought it would be. My desk is full of DVDs and hard drives with back ups of my photos. I'm going to make an official back up and take that to my parents home for safe keeping. I'll pick it up every month or two to add to it from my main system. I think I can get rid of all those DVDs or at least not add to them anymore.

I'm very excited to finally have some direction in my life. A way to begin to focus on my passions. I can't wait to discover what they are! I have lived for so long not really knowing what I wanted to do or how I was going to do it.

Chris.

New Tagline

You may, or may not, have noticed that I've changed the tagline on my blog header.

It used to read:

"After struggling with my health and weight for most of my adult life I came across the Paleo diet and was amazed at how much better I felt and how much weight I lost while never feeling hungry or like something was missing. It was easy to fall off that wagon though with no support so I started this blog to try and be accountable to the world and myself. It doesn't matter if no one reads this at all but with it out there, the chance is there and I need to keep going just in case."

That was fine when that was the main focus of my early blog here. But, as the weeks have gone on, I've started looking deeply at my life and where I'm going...or not going for that matter. I decided that another weight loss blog just wasn't needed. So the new tag line evolved. Because, as it says, I find myself at an age where I need to refocus my life and start living deliberately.

I will get into more of that in future posts.

Chris.