“I can’t stand this!” declares Husband.

Yikes!  This place is a mess.  The clutter is driving us crazy.  Something has to be done…now.  How can stuff take over so quickly?

So I take a hard look.  Wow.  I sure let things pile up on the very small surfaces we have in this RV trailer.  Let’s see.  What can be put away, thrown away, stored?

Mrs. Overwhelm says, “This is a hopeless mess.  You’ll never get this looking decent till you move out or burn it down.”

Miss Rational says, “Let’s categorize the elements of this mess.  The books and magazines are piled up helter-skelter.  Papers are sliding off their piles, and muddy footwear is chaotic and dirty.  Not to mention cat food and litter in bulky containers that are hard to hide in our one-room living space.”

Pushing back at that negative Overwhelm dame, I straighten the book piles.  One small advance. I clear two small spots on our only shelf.  Ahh.  Space.  Having named the problems, my brain is working in the background on solutions.  Later, I’m ambling down the tool aisle at Costco following Husband in a distracted sort of way when suddenly my full attention focuses on an item I had probably walked past on other visits.  A boot tray for entries!  I grabbed it like a drowning person reaching for a life preserver.  Indeed, it was a sanity preserver.  Only after it was safely in the cart did I dare look at the price.  Whew!  A mere $13. to save my sanity and my marriage.

Next up was the oft procrastinated task of dealing with magazines.  Part of my problem is unrealistic expectations.  Just because I get a magazine, doesn’t mean I need to make time to read it all, but I feel obligated to because I paid money for a subscription.  However, I can probably get similar info online when I need it without the clutter and the guilt of monthly magazines.  I’ve pared down to one subscription.  It is helpful to get monthly reminders to add new healthy recipes to my repertoire.  Hmm.  I used to get emails with recipes.  Whatever happened to that helpful tool?  I digress, each day I take about 15 minutes to go thru one magazine tearing out recipes and ideas, then putting the magazine in the recycle bin.  The magazine pile is shorter, but my paper pile is growing.(!)

The mother of all tasks is dealing with papers.  I had a great system of putting papers in 3 ring binders with dividers like Warranties and Receipts, Health, Bank, and two separate binders for all my cook-from-scratch recipes.  I had a three hole punch right beside the notebooks and several times a week I’d put the papers in their own cozy compartment in their binder.  But, alas, the said hole punch is in regions unknown in storage and I’m just too cheap to re-purchase.  I used plastic page protectors for recipes so I could take them out of the notebook and lay them on the counter and not ruin them.  How many times have I stood in Costco in front of the plastic page protectors and tried to justify buying a box of something I already own, but just can’t find in storage?  How can such small links  totally undo my whole paperwork system?!  Which exposes another whole mess-  my fears about money and waste.  But that’s another topic.

I learned in my photography studies that the eye needs negative space in an image to rest.  The eye becomes fatigued if there is too much competing information in the frame.  I learned the same in interior design school.  We need some cleared space to feel peaceful.  Too much stimulation wears us out.  Clutter is like background static in your brain.

What it boils down to is; What do I use every day? Can it be put out of sight and still be handy?  What is beautiful?  How can I emphasize it?  What paper system is easy enough that I’ll use it?

In the tiny crowded RV cupboards and closet, surely some things aren’t important enough to take up precious space. It amazes me how often my needs change and I’m not now using something I used often just a few months ago.  Small spaces intensify the need for constant culling.  If it isn’t used daily, I need to throw it or stow it for later use.  If it is used daily is there any way to put it out of sight except when I’m actually using it?  Which brings me back to culling.  If I keep paring down to only the daily necessities, then there is room to put them away.  I’m learning the secret to having restful space is having less stuff.  Fortunately, most of us have a decent amount of space, so we can have more stuff.  But the temptation is to keep bringing stuff into our homes and not taking any out. This is insidious.  It seems like we need ________ (fill in the blank), so we purchase it.  Eventually, we can’t find the things we need because we have too many things.

I have lots of motivation to truly learn this lesson about stuff now because our house under construction is much smaller than our last houses and lacks storage space.  I’ll be reminding myself often that less stuff will make my little house more restful.  I’m picturing sentries at the doors.  “Halt!” they say.  “What goes here?  Is it necessary?  Do you have a specific place for it?  No?  Then you may not pass.  We’re the ‘stuff’ police.”

“Then he said, “Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own.”  Jesus in Luke 12:15