Monday, October 5, 2015

On the Lost and Found Department

I have been in the business of lost and found since I was a very young child. School work, watches and items of clothing seemed to vanish and reappear without explanation. Nothing has changed. I still continually lose things.

The really spooky thing about it is I do not worry that I will never get it back. Well, not usually. I will have to admit that misplacing my camera last week did get my attention. I asked for help and searched high and low only to find it, not in my own house, but in my daughters. No, it didn't fly across the street and up two blocks. I actually left it there. That adventure spurred a series of Facebook messages that had everyone laughing. It looked like this:
See what I mean. Losing things is frustrating and a big waste of time, especially if I actually worry about it and do a search.

A Decluttered Home
Now I cannot find my Halloween lights. It is not that important but very frustrating. I just saw them not so very long ago but a very intense search has not turned them up. Now I see that karma is out to get me. Just within the last couple of days I have seen articles written about decluttering and keeping only what makes you happy. A book by Marie Kondo has hit the New York Time's bestseller list. She it the queen of decluttering it seems. NPR from Boston had this to say about her skills.
Marie Kondo has built a huge following in her native Japan with her “KonMari” method of organizing and de-cluttering. Clients perform a sort of tidying up festival: time set aside specifically to go through belongings. Each object is picked up and held, and the client needs to decide if it inspires joy. If it doesn’t, it needs to go. 
from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.”
Then the front page of a magazine called Country Home told me that I could "Decorate With What [I] Love". It didn't tell me to get rid of stuff but I see a trend here. Perhaps it is time for me to give away clothes that were gifts and don't fit any more and pictures than belonged to my mother/grandmother/aunts. The pictures really must not bring me joy because they are in a box beside the refrigerator in the garage unopened since we moved 4 years ago. Then again I am not sure. I have not "picked up and held" them for years before we even moved.

Pray for me. Now I am obsessed. I need the courage to clean enough stuff from my life so my Halloween Lights will reappear. That, my friends, would truly inspire joy.  

Have a wonderful Monday.

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You might also enjoy Kitty Bartholomew, where have you gone?

4 comments:

  1. We just did a big cleanup of our basement and I found things I thought were lost forever! Still have a long way to go, though, so I feel your pain.

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    Replies
    1. It is good to know that I have company. Some times I wonder if I am the only one!

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  2. We have many conversations in our house about "lost and found"...and there are only two of us. Mostly it is my husband looking and muttering about how I put things away all the time but never where they belong. We downsized and moved only a year ago. I followed the advice about keeping only what I loved. A lot of stuff was given away to family and strangers alike. But, still, with all of that and a great storage area in our home, we still can't find the box of pictures I actually did save or the negatives I was working on pre-move to digitize and save for a family CD of pictures, and...well, you get the picture. So, once I find the missing blue scissors, the candle lighter, the ink I just bought for the printer and the instructions for his camera which I probably did pack a year ago and even unpacked but can' remember - THEN, I will look for my pictures when I have time and feel like working on that project again! Retirement is so fun!

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    Replies
    1. Well, at least we have time to look. It isn't the time I am short of...but it is the patience!

      You made me laugh.

      If you give a retiree an object, they will look for a box. When she/he finds the box, he/she will need to move the other boxes but first he/she will need to look in each of the other boxes to see what in there...and so it goes.

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