A solution for decluttering

While posting my last post about attachment, a thought hit my mind. The reason I keep my cd's in a drawer, for instance, is so I can't see them. They are nicely tucked away and when I open up the drawer, I feel a bit of the attachment and emotion there is in that drawer.

I think this happens with a lot of stuff people tend to keep close, but out of sight. Sometimes even not so close in a storage, but out of sight anyway. I think it's not a 'maybe, one day, I could use it'. I honestly believe it's the attachment to the piece of stuff. In an ongoing consumerism world, what we 'have' shows for who we 'are'. I have, so I am. For some reason I manage to become a staring time traveler whenever I see stuff from the (even sometimes not so) good old days.

And keeping stuff is easy; we have big houses, big closets, big garages so we can tuck everything away, so remembrance is close but not in our way. Hence, whenever we tend to de-clutter and try to get rid of things in a garage sale, we overprice our items (hey, someone has to pay for our emotions) or we just give them a different place between the same stuff.

Even while I live fairly small and are on a fairly reasonable tour of de-cluttering, even I manage to tuck things away here.

How different would this be if I lived in a tiny house. With everything built to maximum efficiency, the stuff we can't get rid of would be a serious pain in the cracker. Imagine having to move your cd's around everytime you wanted to cook dinner or eat or even go to sleep. After a couple of annoying weeks (or would it be days?) you would give the items away as quickly as possible (because throwing them out of the window is not so very environmentally friendly).

So my plan with the cd's and the Lego? Put them in plain sight! Just let it be in the living area for a couple of weeks. Let's see is I can make a piece of art of it or I'll get sick of it all lying around. I think I'll be craving to put the stuff back in the closets, but I want this experiment to last. It'll confront me with any emotion that's left in it until it fades away and become nothing more than stuff laying around in plain sight.

I've got no clue wether this will work, but hey. You've gotta try something new because the old pattern (tucking away for another day) doesn't bring any different result.

Anyone else want to spread out their never-ever-using-but-maybe-someday items out on the living room floor?