Recently I unpacked a box of towels. To be specific, one of our boxes of towels. Imagine my surprise while packing to discover that all of our towels don't fit into one moving box. We seem to have a lot of towels.
Now, I don't know how many towels the average family has. And I haven't counted ours to know how many we actually have. But we have the towels we got as wedding presents from our registry, the towels we got as wedding presents that weren't on our registry, the towels Staffan had before we were married, and the towels I had before we were married. Then of course there are other categories of towels, like beach towels and baby hooded towels, and so forth.
The overwhelming majority of our towels are blue. We registered for different shade of blue towels when we got married. The towels Staffan had before we were married were also blue. The towels that I had before we were married were green. I only had a few. After all, how many towels does one person need? You use one for a week or so, throw it in the laundry, and assuming you do laundry about once a week, the first towel is back when it's time to wash the second one. By this logic, it's reasonable to have about 3 towels per person... in case laundry gets delayed or you want to pack a clean one for a trip or something like that. Add a few extras for when guests come, and it seems reasonable for our family of 3 to have no more than 15 towels.
As I was unpacking all these towels and realizing we have more than we need, I decided it was time to get rid of a few towels. The most obvious candidates were the green ones that don't match any of the others. We never even use them because they don't match. So I set them aside and started putting the assorted blue towels in the linen closet. And yet, the whole time, I keep looking at this small pile of green towels. It's bothering me that they're sitting there. They're still in great shape. What difference does it make what color they are if they get you dry? Guest towels don't have to match the bathroom, and maybe a different color makes it easier to tell whose is whose. By the time the blue towels were stacked in the closet, I was rearranging to create more space and in went the green towels too.
What a small step in the right direction it would've been to give away 4 towels that we never use. And yet there they sit right this moment in my linen closet. Like they've done for the past 9 years, occasionally coming out to take up space in a moving box to be moved to a new linen closet. So why does it bother me so much to give them away?
Monday, June 13, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
Un-simple Moving :(
We recently moved. About a week ago, actually. And the experience reminded me of why I started this little blog in the first place. It also reminded me that it's been about 9 months since I've updated it, which is pathetic really. Not because I'm out to become the world's most prolific blogger or that I think anyone is really following it, but because the intent was to accomplish something and sadly I have made little progress toward my goals. This is not a time, though, to spiral into shame and self-blame, but to reevaluate and begin again.
We hired a moving company to transport our worldly possessions, and based on their averages and experience, they estimated that a family the size of ours moving from an apartment the size of ours would need about 30 cubic meters. (Don't worry if you don't know how much a cubic meter is, you don't need to to understand my point.) We loaded the truck with a little over 40 cubic meters. Granted, the company changed our time at the last minute and our final packing was done hastily, and in many cases not even by us. We probably could have packed smaller given more time. I probably would've found more things to give/throw away if I had been packing things myself. But still, it was enlightening to find out that we are living with about 33% more stuff than the average comparable family.
The other thing about moving is the direct confrontation with the reality of how much stuff we have. Packing it, loading it, moving it, unpacking it, and finding new homes for all the "stuff". I haven't liked what I've seen these past few weeks and I'm determined all over again to do something about it. I am once again motivated to de-clutter life - our stuff, our time and commitments, etc - and be more intentional about how I really want to live. I hope to take up this poor, dormant blog again as a part of this effort. More to come soon...
We hired a moving company to transport our worldly possessions, and based on their averages and experience, they estimated that a family the size of ours moving from an apartment the size of ours would need about 30 cubic meters. (Don't worry if you don't know how much a cubic meter is, you don't need to to understand my point.) We loaded the truck with a little over 40 cubic meters. Granted, the company changed our time at the last minute and our final packing was done hastily, and in many cases not even by us. We probably could have packed smaller given more time. I probably would've found more things to give/throw away if I had been packing things myself. But still, it was enlightening to find out that we are living with about 33% more stuff than the average comparable family.
The other thing about moving is the direct confrontation with the reality of how much stuff we have. Packing it, loading it, moving it, unpacking it, and finding new homes for all the "stuff". I haven't liked what I've seen these past few weeks and I'm determined all over again to do something about it. I am once again motivated to de-clutter life - our stuff, our time and commitments, etc - and be more intentional about how I really want to live. I hope to take up this poor, dormant blog again as a part of this effort. More to come soon...
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