The Bucket List Cleanout

Last month I read the free ebook, 16 Rules for living with less from The Minimalists. This short book didn't take long to read and basically covers concepts related to clearing out the clutter from your house and life. I've seen their stuff before, so they're not new to me, but an idea that was thrown out there in the book caught my attention and has already resulted in, literally, hundreds of items leaving my house, bound for the firepit, junkyard, and thrift shops.

After reading about the idea of the 30-Day Game (or challenge), where you get rid of the same number of items as the day of the month, I decided to give it a try for the last 12 days of July. On July 19th, I purged 19 items from the house. On the 20th, 20 items found a new home by being donated or trashed. By the end of the month, 325 items had been removed from our house...and I couldn't even tell a difference. 

So on August 1st, I kept going. One item the first day; a shirt that I purchased this summer, but really didn't like the way it fit on me. I tugged and pulled and messed with it, and finally decided that life was too short to wear shirts that aren't comfortable. I also decided I couldn't waste time beating myself up over money spent on a shirt I didn't return and wasn't going to keep. Better to cut my losses, learn from the experience, and pass the shirt on to someone else who would wear it and love it. 

The second day I tossed another ill-fitting shirt, and a book that I read once, gave a three-star review to on Goodreads, and will never read again. On the third day, three music books for guitar, found while rummaging around in a cabinet, went out. We don't even own a guitar. And the purge continued.

• Dry-erase markers that were dried out.
• Dust-covered artwork that had been hanging on the walls in our bathroom for the last 20 years.
• Off-brand Miralax that had been languishing on our kitchen counter since a child was in need of it back in 2020. 
• A stack of half-used coloring books
• Two empty tin cans, once destined for a science experiment that never happened.
• A cracked, vintage Cool Whip container filled with the broken nubs of crayons from my youth (I'm in my 40s). 

While I'm not proud of any of this, I also don't think I'm alone in my clutter. Our homes are magnets for all.the.stuff. The clearance bin deals that grab us, the clothes that almost fit, the orphaned socks that are kept on the off chance that one day all their missing mates will be found...after the kid's feet have outgrown them. We keep boxes of tea we bought, tried, and disliked...simply because we don't want to be wasteful. 

But is that really any better? Instead of passing it on to someone who might use it, we waste it by letting it fill our drawers and cabinets, basements and attics. It takes up space in our minds because whenever we stumble across it, we feel guilty for not using it, drinking it, wearing it, or worse still, wasting money on it. So we stuff it back in the drawer, close the cabinet door, or move it to a box in the basement "for later." But later never comes.  

Shortly before the July purge, I was browsing around a local store, killing time while my kids were doing martial arts. I came across a little leather notebook, with the words "Bucket List" stamped into the leather on the front. The paper inside had that thick, handmade feel, and I immediately knew it had to come home with me. 

After I got home, I started writing down items in my notebook that I'd like to do before I kick the bucket. Some of them are simple, others will take a little more planning and money, and a few are pretty out there. But as I wrote down each item, I was struck by the fact that if I wanted to achieve any of the items on my list, I needed to unburden myself of the stuff that was getting in the way. 

Every day, I make little tick marks in my Bucket List book, noting the items that are leaving our home. I don't have a fixed number of items that need to leave, nor do I know how many months I'll do this. I just know that with every tick mark, I feel a little bit more free. And that's the biggest Bucket List item of all.

What's Up With The Name?

What's in a name? In this case, it's the feeling I got after cleaning out desk drawers and pen pots and finding what felt like a thousand pens - some which worked, and some that didn't. One thousand pens. And has owning all those pens stopped me from buying more? No, it has not. I continue to be drawn to them, like a moth to a flame. And, by the way, it's not my fault. As I recently learned, it's genetic.

Last year I helped my aging parents move out of their house of 28 years, and we went through all the stuff. One of the items that was purged from my parent's house was a pot - or more specifically, a coffee mug - of pens. My dad had kept them on the kitchen counter for as long as I can remember. He didn't use them, that I saw, he just added to them. It wasn't his only stash of pens, but it was the one that he handed to me and said, "Make it go away." Coffee mug and all. 

And so now it sits at my house, in our homeschool room. I'm slowly working my way through the pens. Some write smoothly and are a joy to scroll across the page, while others have that scratchy edge that I just can't stand, and they've gone straight to the trash. But even though some have been tossed, this has done nothing to help with my own purging. My own pen collection remains strong, which brings us back around to the name of this blog and how we got here.

In a future post, I'll share a little bit more about my Bucket List Cleanout (and the subtitle of this blog: Musings from the Junk Drawer), but for now, let's just say that I was forced to face my pen hoarding tendencies while working my way through my own office space. Pens and highlighters I've had since high school (I'm having hot flashes now, so that should tell you that high school was a while ago). Dried-out markers, cheap pencils that wouldn't sharpen without breaking if their lives depended upon it, pens that used to be "favorites" that fell out of favor, and the list goes on. 

One thousand pens. That's what's in my junk drawers...among other things. It's more metaphor than reality (though, if all my writing instruments were collected in one location, it might be sadly accurate). As a country (I live in the U.S.) our houses, apartments, and storage units are filled with things that we walk by daily. Our things sit there, waiting to be used or tossed by us...or by future generations. It's not just pens. It's storage bins, notebooks, bags, kitchen utensils, clothes we'll fit in again "someday," and so much more.

If you're tired of your stuff holding you hostage, then welcome! If it feels like you have a thousand pens, but you really only want a dozen, I hope you'll stick around, because I think we might be kindred spirits. Let's simplify together.