Why do we or I hesitate to throw away old stuff? We have gotten to a point where we just have too much clutter and stuff all over the house and it occurs to me that the easiest solution is to throw away things we have outgrown or have broken and gotten used up.
A couple months ago, we cleaned up the yard and we had been talking about breaking down the trampoline to get rid of it, but then I would get soft about it because the boys used to enjoy jumping on it so much when they were younger. There was a point where even I liked to get on it to lie down and enjoy an afternoon with the boys and their friends swimming or just goofing around. It had a lot of memories and was a source for a lot of fun at one point, but the mat had gotten threadbare and although it wasn't torn, it did seem like if I got on it, I would have gone through it. The big negative was that the grass was always growing under it because it was hard to shove the mower under it. While cleaning the yard, DD took it upon himself to start breaking it down, it was one of those in my head "do it, what are you doing?" kind of things, but I knew it needed to go. That weekend I fit the mat part in the trash can and over the next few weeks I cut and fit all the metal structure in the trash. It is now all gone and the yard looks bigger for it and much better. It needed to go, the mat was so dirty that even touching it would leave your hands black and grimy.
Yesterday, I decided to clean up the front of the house a bit, we just seemed to have a few too many shoes by the door. We have a shoe rack that fits about 15 pairs of shoes which I think is a good number to be at the ready. But when I was done, I took about 15 pair to Wife's closet and another 4-5 pairs to both boy's rooms. I ended up throwing away like 4 pairs that were in horrible shape. When I told Baby A I had thrown away some shoes he got a little sad and I told him "which are missing if you miss them so much?" He couldn't figure it out. I told him I threw away some broken Crocs (the plastic gives way eventually, one had a hole on the bottom), shoes that were split in half and some ugly ones from when he was like in 6th grade. He wanted to be sad about them, but I told him "what do you want them for, they don't fit and they were ugly?"
I guess as humans, we place nostalgia on anything, but if we live like that, we risk becoming hoarders and we've all seen how hoarders live. It sucks for a moment, but I think once we see the space we gain from getting rid of things we don't use, it becomes a gift in itself. The area around the front door looked so much more inviting without all our shoes all over.
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