For reasons I still can’t comprehend, tonight Sunny and I decided to reorganize the closet in my office at home. I suspect every home has that place where stuff just accrues, that handy closet where you can throw things when you’re trying to clean up quickly. Well, my closet in my office has become just such a space in our home. I’m still not really sure how it happened, but we decided at some point that this was the project to be tackled tonight.

At one point, I said to Sunny, “This closet is the closet of regret.” I found old cassette tapes of my grandmother I’d long meant to transcribe; Sunny came across scrapbooks still wrapped in cellophane that she intended to put together for the kids. A lot of really well-intentioned ideas have met their demise in that closet, man.

But we also found a lot of junk. Just stuff we don’t even need anymore, stuff that we’ve moved from one pile to the next until it ended up in this landfill closet.

After my third trip to the trash container outside, I started thinking, “This is crazy.” In North America, it is so easy to be controlled by our stuff, possessed by our possessions. But there’s just something good about getting rid of unnecessary clutter. Between creating the trash pile and the giveaway pile, it felt like I was regaining order over my space.

I’m basically writing this post as a way of reminding myself of the importance of regular decluttering.