I can’t count the number of times I’ve had an item in my hand that I know I can’t get rid of but I just can’t bear the mental decision of having to find a place for something. Sometimes there are those items that fall into the too hard basket. This, I find is a real problem for me as it means there are certain areas of my house which become ‘dumping grounds’ for those moments in time when I just can’t deal.
I have two main places that fall victim to this in my house:
- the kitchen bench
- my study desk
Sometimes when I come into the house there are various pieces of mail I can’t deal with, breakfast spreads that were never put away, jewelry that get’s taken off and dumped, a myriad of things really but the kitchen bench is such an easy place to just dump stuff. My study desk falls into this category as well. Except my study desk has a tendency to be covered in papers that should be filed, but there are frequently times when I just can’t be bothered.
Now not only is my kitchen bench unsightly, I’ve now got filing that will take hours to sort through and complete instead of only a minute or two if done at the correct time. I’ll be honest, when people come over and have the opportunity to see my mess, I’m ashamed. It’s not minimalist at all and right now it’s making me feel so overwhelmed that I’ve already started making a real effort to get things back on track. I’ve found it’s hard to find things when I need and I’m having to waste time rummaging through piles and piles of papers (which wouldn’t be a problem if everything was filed correctly).
I’m not sure why I let things get this bad, I’m certainly not proud of it. I think sometimes life got busy and things like filing went to the bottom of the to do list, or I wasn’t feeling well and just didn’t feel up to doing much. The problem being is that when I did feel up to it, I didn’t do it. But I should have and now it’s causing me extra grief and additional work. Lesson learn’t that’s for sure. I felt this was an important scenario to write about, because I’m not perfect and this is a terrible example of minimalism. But what is important is my motivation to get back on track as I simply hate this feeling of being surrounded by clutter. Right now I’m in the right frame of mind again to make amends and get things looking ‘visitor ready’. My other reason for wanting to write about this was to show everyone that we all have times when we seem to take a few steps backwards, and that’s okay. It’s completely normal.
Do you have areas of you home where you have a tendency to just dump stuff?
This is Minimalism 