paradise ali

When we bought our present home a few years ago, our plan was to pay rent for an extra month at our old place so that we would have time to set up the new house and sort through everything at the old house. The idea was to move only the things we really needed and wanted to keep and take the rest to donate or to the dump. Despite it’s size, our old home sure had a lot of storage space. Well, as the Universe would have it, our best laid plans were tossed out the window when we couldn’t extend our rental.

Our next plan was to move everything from storage in the old house to the storage in the new house. We threw baby clothes, school art projects, kitchen items, receipts, photos, text books, children’s books, and you name it into boxes and bags and hauled it all up here with no labels, no real groupings of like items, just a hurried mess. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have a fair amount of storage in this house, too. We painted almost all of the interior living spaces, moved in new appliances, and settled in. The storage items? For the most part, out of sight, out of mind. Well, intermittently, we’ve gone out there and made a small effort but lately it’s been really nagging at me.

I just read “Celebrate Discardia Starting Today” over at Lifehacker.com and this fits so well with what I’m currently trying to do–clear out clutter. Not just physical clutter but also mental clutter, bad habits, anything that is no longer working for you. It was started at “Discardia” (Imagine that!) in 2003. What I like about this made up holiday is that it takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. That means that the time varies and it happens four times a year. The first Discardia for this year starts today, March 19th and runs until April 5th. Perfect! There’s an end in sight and no pressure to hurry through it half assed just to finish because there’ll be other Discardias in June/July, September and December.