The main thing I’d been doing and getting a ridiculous emotional high off of while I took a break might surprise many folks, especially those who have known me a long time: our whole household went on a cleaning spree that lasted … OK, damn, I LOST TRACK of how long, but... Ah, I see now how this blog archive thing of mine works, and a calendar, ooh how novel... We cleaned for nearly four weeks, minus time spent actually going to our jobs, eating, and sleeping.

We'd already started with realizing we were holding onto some thing we no longer needed and pretty much each deciding on our own on a different test for removing old belongings. Different as in we each used a different one and different as in one we'd never thought to use before but one which was decidedly more in favor of paring down than retaining. I’m not sure what My Dearlin’ and My Love were doing, but for me it’d come down to some hybrid between … “do I really need this?” and “am I really, no wait... do I even have time to cycle through all of these, … no, no, no, NO FEWER, this is TOO COMPLICATED, AUGH!”. You can see that somewhere between answering a spectrum of questions between those two quite a lot of stuff would actually get stuffed into garbage bags. Most of which got donated rather than tossed because it was in too good a condition to conscionably send it to a rubbish heap. Some large (very large) portion of what got tossed were books we would never again read and for some reason were keeping and … really … someone else can take a turn at them. Probably clothing in equal weight. You get the idea. I had to retrieve my jaw when My Love announced her decision to pare down her shoe collection to just under half a dozen. She adores shoes, but even she - observing how few of them she actually used in rotation - decided many of them could be put back in circulation by way of other people getting better use out of them.

I have my bedroom floor back.

That is more nontrivial than it sounds.

You think getting a bedroom floor back should be trivial, and normally you'd be right.

I don’t think I’ve seriously felt what it is like to have a clear path in there -- not a workable path, a clear path -- for almost fifteen years now, and that's two dwellings ago. It was nether dirty nor disorganized really, just too much stuff.

Sometimes it was, say, an attempt to get a desk in where there really wasn’t room for a desk because... HEY A COMPUTER! I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LEAVE MY BEDROOM, SWEET! … yes, that sort of thing. Other functional objects as I desire to create a fantastic room with everything I love in it follow.

Partly that's a talent. I am a damned expert at pack-it-away real life object-tetris. But having the ability to make that arrangement work isn’t nearly the same thing as having the space in the room to cram all that in and still feel real flow. And you know what they say about using your powers for good? Pack-it-away-object-tetris is a damned superpower, and I misapplied it to my bedroom at regular intervals. It would go in cycles like this: clean, remove some stuff, receive and/or buy twice as much stuff, try to re-assemble in a way that looks at least passable. Repeat cycle every three to six weeks. Every nine to fifteen cycles re-arrange the entire room, sometimes by emptying it first (yet getting rid of almost nothing) and enact a more drastic repacking.

There’s still too much for total flow, but 50% available flow is 500% better than 10% available flow. It is. It really frippin’ is. Yes, so the numbers are pulled out of thin air, the air feels better in my room, OK! 500% better! I said so! And I have the thin air to now pull the numbers from!

Here's the part that made me happy. I've been slowly working towards realizing, on so many different fronts, the value of having a workable, addressable number of things/commitments/projects and... have been making progress on nudging my life and all its pieces into something that doesn't overwhelm me. It really is ridiculous to feel overwhelmed by the number of things one owns, and on some level useless. If you own them, they're yours to control, there's an insanely simple solution: let them go. The guilt I had is that either I'd received them or had bought them and -- particularly with things I'd bought -- felt as though I had to justify what I'd done by retaining them until I got full use out of them. There's no sense to it, and I started realizing there was no sense to it once I realized I had enough that I could never use it all.

I'm not even fabulously rich or a clinical hoarder even. I might've been a basket case if I'd not have realized this and actually, say, won the lottery and decided to blow it all on a collection of lawnmowers I'd intend to make a robot army out of but never actually get any where with.

Slightly defensive wisecracks aside, as I've said before, this has little to do with being rich (the times in my life when I had less money I bought cheaper stuff and packed that in the same way) and never even came close to threatening the structure or feeling like I had to hide certain rooms away from folks (unless I'd not thrown my clothes in the hamper, that is, but that's an easy fix -- I'm just sometimes in a rush to get out the door in the morning and don't fix that until I go to bed).

Now, that was the good part of break, aside from good people. Doing that intensively for several weeks, though, my back was getting cranky and I needed a break. Life provided the break I needed, just not one that was pleasant, in the form of a broken computer. That's for the next post, though.

--random