GROIC Day 31

And, finally we reach the end of the month.

I have to confess that today’s effort kind of feels like “this is the way the month ends, not with a bang but a whimper” (to misquote T.S. Eliot). I should have kept something spectacular for the last one, but I ran out of time to be quite that organised, and so instead I’ve been scrabbling around for bits and pieces. My additional problem is that I haven’t quite finalised where all of this is going—and it won’t all be one place—so it feels as if I haven’t “completed” the job yet. And it’s a very bits and pieces collection, too, with Church teaching materials to be returned to the coordinator, some recyclable booklets, an old pair of spectacles I hope I can send somewhere to be reused, a 2005 Melways (Melbourne street atlas; I’ve kept the 2010 one), a couple of graduation ceremony programs, and an old film camera.

However, there are over 31 bits, and it’s the end of the month, and it will have to do.

I guess I must have eliminated over 1200 individual items all up during the month (and that’s counting the litres of paper as litres, and not actually counting all the very many more individual sheets of paper that made up those litres), which is a fair bit of stuff. I have to confess it’s been very satisfying to have decluttered so much, but it has been rather demanding too. Doing such a clean up has been on my to do list for years and I simply haven’t had time to do it. It might be argued that the Get Rid Of It Challenge forced me to make time, but this is not entirely true. I have had to put other important tasks aside to get this done, and there are consequences for that. On the other hand, if I had not done so, I’d still have my clutter and it would likely have stayed cluttered until I retire.

My current problem is that I haven’t quite finished the job (or, at least, got it to where I’d like it to be), and if I stop now the job will remain half done. The friend who issued the challenge originally has extended it into November (or started it again, in fact). I am going to keep going, but I’m going to relax the rules a bit. I’m still aiming for “1+2+3+…+30” (November is one day shorter!), but I’m allowing myself to do things in whatever order I feel like, and I can do multiple “counts” on the same day if I want and have days off other times. I’m also going to try to tackle the office, using the same rules.

But I’m also going to have to get back to those other important tasks.