Coming Out of the Closet, Bag & Box… #4
Organizing is a choice.
Last week Miriam and I tackled the laundry room. That would be the room in which we do the laundry — and where we keep seven years’ worth of birthday party decorations and party bags and wrapping paper and cat and dog food (and the litter box) and craft materials and puzzles, paint cans, a freezer and small fridge… OMG is every room in my house a holding pen for neglected stuff? I mean, we found a super sized lawn trash bag full of empty shopping plastic bags. FULL of them. It had been sitting in the laundry room for years and years and years. Taking up space. Collecting dust. For years –I couldn’t tell you how many. I’m sure that when we put all the empty bags into the big bag we were planning on using them as packing material. Or donating them to child care to use as dirty diaper bags. But I’ll tell you, honestly: I’d never use plastic bags as packing material. And they clearly never left the house. Why did we do it? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
But I know it didn’t happen on its own. My husband and I chose to do it.
Well, now we choose otherways. I got rid of the big bag of bags. Got rid of holiday wrappings and decorations crushed long ago and rendered useless — but still sitting in a box on my laundrey room floor. We consolidated candy and party bags, candles, dishes, crafts — all grouped, categorized and housed in its own special place.
The lesson? It’s all a choice. Organizing, simplifying — I realize that every item I choose to keep, everything I put down in a place that’s not its own, every action I choose is a choice against other actions. Everything is a choice.
So for Mothers Day the kids cleaned up the living room.
After weeks of staring at an infinite number of kids’ stuff like miniature mice and super balls and plastic bugs and oversized drawings and dinosaur cards and dscovered rocks… after weeks and weeks of looking the other way , we took it on.
The children were tasked with the following:
if it’s yours, put it in your pile.
Take your pile and break it into groups of like things.
Put each group of like things where it belongs.
Everything on the table was categorized, grouped and put away. And it was done.
Yes, it took time. And, yes, the kids lost interest quickly. But the reward of being able to find play things they thought gone a long time ago was an instant inspiration. Their sense of accomplishment, and pride, was its own reward, too.
The real reward? The ownership of putting things right. The fact that we’re not deflated within four steps into the house.
The real lesson? We could have done this months ago. MONTHS ago.
And while I still don’t feel like I’ve entirely internalized Miriam’s voice, while I am feeling totally denied by not being in town for this week’s MtO session, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to tackle my old letters and photographs, I’m beginning to actually believe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Tags: accomplishment, choices, kids, laundry, organizing, Simplifying
