Decluttering

My impending move back to Tasmania provides a wonderful opportunity to sort through old bits and pieces, and throw out some (lots?) of things.

The real estate agent calls this “decluttering”.

I hate “decluttering”.

Actually, it is more of a love-hate relationship. I love devising “systems” for filing things and having my memorabilia nicely organised, but, inevitably, I forget my latest system and so, as I discovered today, the same kinds of things end up being filed in three different places. And then there is the fact that I get a bit depressed coming across stuff that reminds me of events I’ve all but forgotten and people I hardly remember or rarely see (but wish I did).  As I have mentioned in another post, I find it a little difficult to deal with my own half-recalled history.

The other problem with decluttering is that there is an intermediate shambolic stage, where everything ends up scattered everywhere before order can be imposed.

So today I sorted through piles of Scout stuff, shown spread across the lounge-room floor in the first photo below. Some of these materials will go up to the Scout hall for the archives and resources there; other bits are for my own files. The second photo shows evidence of (a) how changes in technology can permit dramatic decluttering, and … ummm, well, errr … (b) my geekiness. My collection of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 on VHS cassettes—that was painstakingly accumulated over weeks and months as the cassettes were released at the cost of $20 or so per double episode—is about to be consigned to the scrapheap. Although I still have a functioning video player, I confess to having replaced these with the convenience and compactness of DVDs in the hope (probably naive) that DVDs will be around for a little while longer than VHS. There are seven cartons in the photo, each containing about 19 cassettes (which means that the pile set me back over $2500 (I wish I hadn’t calculated that now!!)); their replacements, in contrast, would fill less than half a box and cost me about $310. I feel a bit bad throwing out all that stuff, but even if I could find an interested geek, I doubt I could give them away.

I will, however, feel glad about the regained storage space.