Simplicity on Saturday

You would think, given how long I've been at it, that I don't have much left to do in terms of simplicity. You would be wrong. I swear to God that there must be some kind of quantum vortex in my apartment. The more stuff I get rid of the more stuff appears.

I met Bob for breakfast (Blackstone Eggs Benedict) and the circled home looking forward to a simple day. Then, I made a fateful mistake. Since my nephew Tom was out for the day I thought I'd go into the spare bedroom where he stays and open the windows all the way to get a good breeze blowing through the whole apartment. It was like an episode of "Destination Unknown".

Now, to be fair, it wasn't all his stuff - part of it was mine, because I'd used the spare room for storage and as kind of a junk catcher. Twelve 30 gallon trash bags later and I'd pretty ruthlessly purged a whole lot of stuff. There was some stuff I did keep, mostly piled on the couch right now, small things of assorted value. The rest of its gone now.

One of the things that dawned on me as I was tackling the formidable task was this. Since Tom moved in with me I've really only gone into the spare bedroom a couple of times, usually to retrieve a specific item or two. Almost everything in there has completely failed the six month test. Almost everything in there can and should go, destined for the trash bin or the donation bin. Most of it (except the books) are not even worthy of the donation bin.

Fortunately I like cleaning. I find it to be very zen. The path to simplicity is also very zen. So you can chalk today up as a very zen day. Twelve bags of zen.