Years ago I wrote about something I called square goldfish. It is located here.
In that note, I wrote about outgrowing your environment and what it means to recognize it’s happened.
Fast forward ten years and I have stumbled upon a concept that better puts those thoughts into a more useful context. The concept is that we all tend to outgrow some things in our lives. I think that all through our lives, we tend to have activities that we do for a while and then sometimes we stop of find new ones. We pick up objects that have some intrinsic value to us and then that value may begin to decline over time because they have outgrown the object. Eventually we may find the object has no value to us anymore but because it once did, we hang on to it. Some people seem to have a natural ability to toss aside that which they have outgrown but others do not. For those who don’t have the natural ability to let go, things can get pretty cluttered around them. This same concept also seems to apply with more than just objects. It can be failed relationships, jobs/careers and even the places we live.
I believe there are many factors that may cause a person to hang on to something longer than truly needed. It can be a sense of never being able to replace something once it’s gone, even if it’s no longer used and has been outgrown. The “what if” one day, it might be needed again lingers in the mind. A great example are old computers. If you have a old PC that you built or just bought and it was at one time considered a high performance machine and now the standard has far surpassed the one you built, would you keep it “just in case”? Why? It’s clear that it’s no longer able to perform the current day operations that have made it obsolete. Does it have content on it? Can you retrieve it? If so, why have you not? This example is easy to see but what about other examples that may not be?
Are you engaging in hobbies or activities that you are just going through the motions so you will not have to admit that maybe you have outgrown them? Are you using an object once in a while so you can justify keeping it around even if you don’t really need or want to use it? Is that just going through the motions so you do not have to acknowledge it’s time to make a decision on what you might need to do with the object? After all, it’s been said that clutter is deferred decisions. In other words, not deciding what do do with something and letting it take up space in your life when it has no true value to you becomes clutter you must deal with.
Take some time to look around and see what you may have laying around in your world and see if you can identify some objects and start with them. Ask yourself, does this object bring me joy? Does it have value? Is it useful? Are you actually using it? If not, you may have outgrown it and you need to decide how to let it go. If you choose to keep it, you are contributing to a pile of objects that you must manage and that is nothing more than a time suck.
Wouldn’t you rather be doing something you enjoy rather than having to burn time to manage instead of having to manage things that just occupy your time and have no value to you?
Rowland Ramble - 