Moving in with JT a few months before our wedding, I had to confront a lot of stuff that I'd been hauling around from apartment to apartment as I wound my way up and down Chicago's neighborhoods and suburbs. While he had (and still has) a few boxes of things that are uncategorized mementos, photos, college papers, etc., he had a much easier time than I did with the process of clearing out old stuff in order to make room for "new."
I remember a quote, I think it was attributed to E.B. White re: editing, "You must kill your children." Meaning - when writing/editing, you tend to fall in love with a phrase or a plot point and you then begin writing around it in order to shore it up, make it useful in the context of the whole. These 'children' are too clever to be useful to the reader and must usually, despite your longing for them, be exorcised from the piece.
Cleaning out 10+ years of accumulated history is a lot like that: the fuzzy blue picture frame that holds a picture of friends you haven't talked to in three years, and have no desire to speak with again, really, is a child of your past. It looked "so awesome" on the wall of your first decrepit apartment, but now is forcing you to shore it up, with similar items from a similar era, a box and a square foot of space in which to store that box.
Insipirations:
Extreme Downsizing: How moving from a 6,000-square-foot custom home to a 370-square-foot recreational vehicle helped quell one family's 'House Lust.' Daniel McGinn, Newsweek.com, Feb. 12, 2008
Unclutterer.com
The Simple Living Network
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