How to Enjoy Decluttering Personal Papers

[Music] this our last class do you part to the paper yeah I know I had some questions why don't you throw one out well one of them is about papers you know sort of working with myself on they serve the purpose do they serve a purpose now so these papers like letters and things like that okay so is this memorabilia okay she's just mentioning her categories okay the categories you just mentioned the categories the categories can change there's overlap between people but the first step would be to sort them so you don't see them all the papers at once then what's the challenge guess it's sort of making peace of sorts with that you know I there's a box of this big full of X Y or Z kinds of papers that were once really important to me and seeing that I spent that much of my life on this topic or this thing which has a lot of emotion to it but then I'm now I'm here and so right away you know it's a negative emotion well it's it's more nice it's bittersweet so it's not just like straight negativity but it's also like that was a prior phase of life and then I'm not sure exactly how it's yeah sort of the same thing that can come up with a book like that there's a lot that can be of memories and well your might wonderful which ones of those to keep and which ones to to sort of sit with those feelings but then also like let it go okay so you might decide that you don't want to let them all go so you need to be present I erased it you want to be prepped you want to slow down make the time to be present and putter through your papers you don't want to attack anything you putter through your clutter you putter through your papers and be interested about what comes up okay you don't need to know all the answers to start you need to start to find the answers and you discover as you sort where you are now in relationship to those papers so for example I went through a whole big trunk a navy trunk of my mother's and father's letters love letters I didn't even know they existed until my father died and we opened the trunk and I went oh my god this was the parents I thought my parents were really quite interesting I open these letters and I went oh my god they're so incredibly boring it was like I went down to Charles Street and had a cheeseburger today I thought I was gonna get the secrets of my parents you know nothing absolutely nothing hundreds of letters they wrote right back and forth she was a Smith and he was in Boston his first job after being out of the war unbelievably boring okay so though I wasn't ready to let them go I made the time I sat down I spent a whole weekend by myself it was a snowy rainy day and I went through every letter and put them as in sequential order so I could make sense of them it was worth my time and my energy to do this and I put them in three-ring binders I saved like three or four and the rest stayed in the books and now what do I do with them I kept I decided what to keep to represent that time in my life or represent that part of my life and then I had fat notebooks of boring letters no outs as possible and so I had to figure it out what am I going to do with these letters because they were taking up a lot of space so I kept a representation of those letters and I called Smith College and I said would you like to have all these letters she was a student when she was writing them and they said yes I'd love to and I drove out to Smith College and they and I dropped them off and it was a beautiful experience but I spent 16 hours before being present to this history and I let go of what was appropriate for me so you be present it's a life review that's how she's seeing it another person might see it as a waste of time you know it's really subjective so it's a life review be present and attend to your intention to determine what to keep representational and let go of the rest often people have a bonfire and burn them okay so you make it you're not getting rid of your past or getting rid of that incredibly powerful time in your life good or bad but you make reverence you let it go in a reverent way it's respectful does that answer your question so only she can decide whether it's worth it her time and energy [Music]

Channel: ClutterClarity

Views: 27,497

Keywords: Organizing, Downsizing, Moving, Time management, Stress management, Productivity, Enjoy decluttering, Clutter clarity, Make getting rid of clutter easy, Good decisions, decluttering clutter, ephemera, personal stories, decluttering paper, Smith College, familypapers

Id: 2f4pNUbuGKU

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018