Msnikkidee does decluttering

So hands up if you have  ever made a new year’s resolution to declutter your house/room/desk and may be started, but did not complete, it  or worse you do completed it but ended up buying a new lot of clutter in a sense replacing what you have thrown out???  Then you are back to square on!!!. Well that has been me many times. So this year, it was not even on my agenda, however a chance nosy at a friend’s  Facebook sates status had me knee high in clutter before I  really had time to think. 

And surprisingly I am very excited about this, I really think its going to succeed where I had previously failed in the past.  I like the premise under which i took this on, ( did you know that there are books written about decluttering?) this is not just about getting rid of rubbish, but more concentrating on what we love and getting rid of those things that do not bring us joy and do not work.  

I immediately outed myself, i took a picture of the first place I wanted to declutter  and posted it on our newly formed FB group, as such i have no choice but to follow it through, 

The surface clutter was easy, old bills and papers lying around and there was a lot of it, kept me busy.  I hit a major tricky patch when it came to my books.  Anyone who knows me, will know how much i love my books. I do get a lot of joy from them, even just by looking at them, so by this reckoning should just keep the givers of joy right? In the end i had to concede, as in get over this, if i wanted to succeed in the long term, and so to this end, I was rather brutal on my journey to  get rid of those books i knew i would not be reading again, but none the less, it was blooming emotional and i had to change my criteria more than once.  One end i still have 2 full shelves and then some to go through, but so far so good. The majority of what I have retained are my classics such as Robinson Crusoe, the jungle book, and other exciting books. I also kept a good few that were about my beloved country, Nigeria, not forgetting my professional/self help books. 

Wasteful 

Now did I mention that I found the bit rather emotional, this is a good point to say how really I was shamed, by my obvious taking for granted of my privileged life, I found several unused notebooks and worse still duplicate books, purchased by me,  my discussion with a fellow group member, leads me to believe that yes shame just about covers it as does indiscipline. 

i understand that this is the fist stage of what will be a rather long process, but I can already feel the benefits and I am looking forward to see how it will turn out. 

One of the reasons i feel that this will success this time, is motivation and it is based around desire rather than a feeling that  I should, which surely only leads to bad feelings, ones of guilt and shame.  It will be habit changing some of which has happened already, but that is another week’s blog post.