Random Thoughts-16: "Cluttering, Uncluttering and Decluttering"

I take pride in calling myself a booklover and book collector. But my family members have different ideas and call me by different names, which I prefer not to mention here.

I have been collecting books from my childhood. For a person who does not own a house and who is compelled to shift house periodically, this could be a real headache. Under these difficult and painful circumstances, however best I tried, limiting and preserving books was becoming a great worry.

During the course of my life (I am nearing 60), I have hardened my heart and parted with a lot of books out of desperation, despair and dejection. Yet I was accumulating more books and paper-cuttings than I was getting rid of. The painful part of it is the volume of my reading was going down all the time. So it is obvious I was accumulating more cud than I can chew.

The other painful thing is when I wanted something, more often than not I was finding it difficult to locate it. I would be pretty sure that I have the required material with me, still I would not be able to lay my hands on it. It is as good as or as bad as not having it.

What to do?

Sometimes friends are helpful in this regard. They borrow books and never return them. Here the crunch is I have only a limited number of friends. For this sake I can’t develop new friendships.

My wife and children were and are making my life miserable by threatening to throw out everything, if I do not get rid of, well in their language, ‘the junk’ myself. I started having nightmares of finding my room barren with the books having vanished from there.

Then I came across this article in time.com: “How to live with just 100 things”
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html)

Very interesting article and if you are like me, a must read and I hope even otherwise everyone reads it. That is how I came to know about Dave Bruno and clutter-free living and goal-oriented minimalists and SHED (acronym stands for ‘Separate the treasures, Heave the trash, Embrace your identity from within and Drive yourself forward’).

Dave Bruno’s online musings caught the attention of a lot of people (obviously there a lot of people like me) and suddenly the Net erupted with websites and articles on decluttering.

When I looked up ‘declutter’ in Google, it came up with 1,170,000 results for declutter in 0.25 seconds! Hats off to you, Google!!

Some of the results from Google are really very interesting and innovative. I am citing a few examples for your kind perusal, in the fond hope that you also will like them and maybe you may also try to declutter your home.

1. How to Declutter Your Home: http://declutteryourhome.blogspot.com
2. Declutter Your Home Fast and Save Yourself from Embarrassment by Ricky Liang : http://ezinearticles.com
3. Declutter Forum: http://www.amazon.com/tag/declutter/forum
4. Declutter 15 minutes a day: http://www.43things.com/things/view/113682/declutter-15-minutes-a-day
5. Get Organized Today with Free Tips Booklet: http://ineedmoretime.com
6. Cut Clutter: http://organizedhome.com/articles/cut-clutter
7. No More Clutter, Declutter Your Home: http://www.myhouseandgarden.com/declutter.htm
8. How to Live with Just 100 Things: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html
9. Ask the Experts: 5 Steps to Clutter-Free Living: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812185,00.html?iid=redirect-declutter
A detailed and directly relevant article to this topic I came across in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding. As usual, Wikipedia is very informative and I picked up a few valuable points from there also.

Now, don’t ask me whether I have decluttered my room. As always, implementation is hardest part. Hope I shall get around to do it sooner or later.

Grateful thanks to Time.com, Google and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.