I have often thought, over the last couple of years, of starting a blog. (Because really, what the world needs is another blog.) That notion has, until now, ended up on the list of endlessly postponed “it would be nice to do” things. That day when I would inaugurate my blog with a carefully crafted wise and witty post, I have recently realized, is never going to come. So I am going to do the literary equivalent of a cannonball into the pool and just get started already.
So here goes: my reason for starting now, and the focus of this first post, is going to be the challenge I posed to myself two days ago. I live in a three-bedroom house with my husband, our three boys, four cats, two fish, and a whole lot of stuff. The bigger the boys get and the longer we live here, the more stuff we seem to have. I have been making fitful attempts at cleaning out and organizing almost since we moved in, and none of them seem to make any lasting difference against the rising tide of material goods.
Earlier this summer a friend of mine proposed that we mutually work on organizational challenges to motivate us. Her suggestion was that we start by getting all unnecessary things off the floor. I have to say that I failed miserably at this. Part of that was because as soon as she proposed the idea I got a fresh wave of freelance work that sucked up all my spare time. The other part, I realized, was because there is so much unneeded junk in my house that its position hardly matters. I have to take a step back and start by getting rid of things.
So my first task is what I call the 1,000-Pound Project. The goal is to get rid of 1,000 pounds of unneeded stuff over the next 20 weeks—keeping it to a manageable 50 pounds per week. I’ve set a few rules for myself to keep me honest:
1. It doesn’t count until it leaves the house.
Sticking it in the garage doesn’t count. My garage is full of stuff that is ostensibly out of the house but is still part of the “stuff” nightmare—old papers, old clothes, old toys that we crammed in boxes rather than dealing with at that moment. Instead of a spot to park my car I have ranks of boxes full of junk. So this rule is very important—until the item I am getting rid of actually goes in the trash or recycling or gets donated to charity, it doesn’t count toward the total.
2. Things that are regularly dumped out don’t count.
The point of this exercise is not to give myself a pat on the back for good habits I’ve already developed, like recycling the junk mail and the odd copy of the Watchtower that the local Jehovah’s Witnesses drop off the second it comes through the mail slot. Ordinary trash and recycling don’t count. Now, the stack of papers I discover in that box that hasn’t been opened in two years—that counts. That box is sucking up room in my bedroom or garage, and getting rid of it (and its kin) ARE the point of this exercise.
3. Things that have been taking up space without serving a purpose do count.
This category is intentionally kind of broad. Not everything that I have stored for months, sadly, had a purpose at one time. There have been weeks where life got completely crazy and the stack of papers from the dining room table got swept into a bag and stuck in a corner of my bedroom in a faux-cleaning run when I was trying to make the house presentable for company. Nothing is quite as humiliating as discovering that the dust-covered paper bag that has been taking up space in the corner contains nothing more important than a couple of credit card offers, expired grocery coupons, a months’-old newspaper, and an old school flyer for a workshop you never intended to go to anyway. So whether it is clothes the kids have outgrown, toys they no longer play with, books we no longer read, old cable bills from our apartment in Berkeley, or whatever, if it has been taking up space when it no longer serves a purpose in this house, it is on the hit list.
What do I expect to find in what I hope will be a ruthless campaign to get rid of things we no longer need? I can tell you what I’ve already found, in the two days since I started weeding stuff out:
- Clothes I haven’t worn since the Clinton administration
- PTA papers pertaining to fundraising campaigns conducted four years ago, which nobody (including me) has looked at in over three
- Backup copies of freelance work I completed over a year ago
- Empty boxes for cell phones we no longer own
And this was all in my bedroom.
Why 1,000 pounds? I don’t know. I can tell you that I’ve already surpassed my 50-pound goal for this week (paper weighs a lot!), so I wanted to set the goal high enough that I still have work to do after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Maybe it won’t be high enough. I’ll just have to see.
Why 20 weeks? I have to keep the task to a size where I can fit it into life as I know it. The school year is about to start again, and with it soccer season, which means volunteer work, and homework, and practices, and games, and back-to-school nights, and fundraising. Throw in the high holy days, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas, and the time between the first day of school and New Year’s starts to feel like a treadmill set a notch or two too high. I hope that 50 pounds a week will still be a manageable amount with all that going on. (I am going to allow myself to average, however, so that extra progress in one week will help make up for weeks when I may make none at all.)
So if this is all about stuff—too much of it and the need to purge—then why is the blog called “Finding the Eye of the Storm”? It’s because I believe that the ballooning amount of stuff is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. An overabundance of stuff can be remedied with some time and energy, which are two things I don’t have an overabundance of. So how did I get to this point where I feel that my life has two modes: busy and busier? How do I turn that treadmill off occasionally so that I can catch my breath? If I thought I was the only person who felt this way, I’d chalk it all up to poor time management or my notorious inability to say no to volunteer work, but since I’ve just spent a summer with my friends commiserating over the deeply crispy burnout cases we’ve all become, I don’t think that’s it. So the title of the blog reflects what is currently on my mind—how to find some momentary calm in the middle of the craziness that is my life. (I mean, seriously, I have three boys—things aren’t going to be very quiet around here for me until about 2024, unless I go deaf first.)
And why now? So I’ll be too embarrassed to quit the 1,000-Pound Project, of course!
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