00038: Cultural Representation

22 Days, twenty-two items

I still cannot believe the amount of stuff I have accumulated in one single room. People, I have eight days to go and I still have not touched one quarter of my home office and the closet. Wow! How do we humans become so accustom at collecting stuff, most of it useless once it has serve its original purpose? There is an answer but I will talk about it in another post.

Everything you see in the image above has had an importance in my life, of course. Trinkets I bought in many of my trips to Mexico, for example. But now, the majority of those trinkets were boxes and never used again because newer trinkets replaced them.

Two things are happening in my decluttering process, 1) I’m finding out how I need to be more aware of the stuff I decide to box because “I might need it later.” 2) Decluttering is making me aware of how much value I put into things. Believe me, it has been incredibly challenging to get rid of some items and I noticed I keep pushing them to “the other side of the room” for further inspection.

At the same time, I’ve been noticing that while I don’t want to get rid of “this and that” at the moment, I find, once I put it to the side for “further evaluation,” that within a few hours I’m already thinking of getting rid of it. By the end of day or by the next day I have made up my mind about the item. I either keep it or give it away. If I decide to keep something, though, it has to pass my many random personal questions, such as, why is this necessary, why is this important to me, is there something else that has the same emotional value as this thing that I already have or something else that evoques the same emotions as this thing, etc…. If the answers are yes, I compared the two items and decide which of the two to keep. If the answer is no, I give myself time to process the emotions and find ways to see how I can have the same emotions and memories without the item. It’s not easy but it works for me and that’s all that matters

This 30-day Minimalism Game/Challenge isn’t simple, mainly because the activity has nothing to do with just grabbing stuff and throwing it away, but rather with the fact that while getting rid of stuff, a psychological and emotional process is happening within, and while this is the most beneficial aspect of the challenge (obviously), it is also the most difficult because I end up dealing with the unexpected and unwanted “skeletons in the closet.”

Needless to say, at the end “it’s all good” because once I reach the end of the 30-day challenge, there would be close to 500 less items in my home office, and the emotional, psychological, and mental process I’ve gone through is also lighter. So far, this experiment has been life-changing. #carlosmanuelspeaksthetruth