I'm still helping my dad eliminate the excess in the garage. I was reminded today that simplifying is very different from organising. I think I want to be a simplifier rather than just a straight up organiser. Although I love the organising, I find it much more satisfying to simplify things down to the basics. I will be very happy though to help people organise whatever items they want to, even if they are stockpiling cables like my dear daddy.
He had two man drawers full of exciting and important looking cables. There is something about electronic items that do make them hard to part with. They have a certain presence of being important and a niggling dread that if you eliminate them you'll upset the balance of the universe somehow. After a little debate, a quick chat with Phil and a realisation that if he hasn't needed them for the last three years, and has no idea what they belong to, chances are they won't be needed any time in the near future, he was ready to release them back into the wild.
They did seem a little too important to just dump, so I advertised them on the local buy, swap and sell site and had 8 people contact me within 45 minutes who were all interested in taking them off our hands. A lovely older man came to pick them up and was going to categorise them and store them carefully (future client?). I was going to measure how many meters of cable he let go, but I quickly realised it would literally take me hours to measure it all. It would have been great to line it all up end to end and see how far around the village I could go with it. Alas, there wasn't time for that either. He kindly posed for a photo though and it was quite a shock to see it all laid out on the floor.
I think often in life we carry around endless amounts of baggage "just in case". I know I hang on to lots of stuff that weighs me down and gets in the way of moving forward. I do think there's a huge correlation between the things we hang on to and our emotions and our fears. A lot of it is subconscious but as I learn more about it, I find it fascinating to analyse why I struggle to live more simply. I definitely function better with less stuff around me, but I fight against the minimalism too as I also want to be prepared for every eventuality. I'm learning less is definitely more in my world and hopefully my daddy will feel a bit less tied down with all that cabling out of the way.
My quote for today is “Choosing to Let Go crashes the pity party thrown by all the “What ifs” and “If onlys.”― Justin Young
My photo today is of my amazing daddy lying amidst his cabling.
Comments