Purging

This Christmas holiday, our family is not going on a trip anywhere, but will instead stay home and declutter the house. We are going to London next week for Thanksgiving, which I am eagerly anticipating, but I am looking forward to our time at home for Christmas with just as much expectation. I feel like our house, possessions, lives are out of control and need reigned in. One of the best ways to do this is by purging, by taking inventory of what we no longer need and moving on.

Will and I used to de-clutter our house annually. When our children were small, they stayed with grandparents for a week each year at Christmas while we organized, re-arranged, and cleaned the house from top to bottom. Staring in 2013, we switched to taking a family vacation each year during that same time, which has been glorious and wonderful, but the stress from our house has continued to mount each year. We moved in 2015, and decluttered a great deal then, but have had no similar purges since then, and it shows.

While our physical house is in the most need of a drastic overhaul, so are much of the rest of our lives and commitments. I spent 30 minutes this afternoon purging my "Want to Read" books on my Goodreads account and cutting the number of books I plan to read in half. I originally added many of these books with good intentions but they no longer excite me, and lseeing them on my list was causing me a nagging sense of failure. I want to thoroughly examine all of our family's commitments and figure out which ones may have served a purpose for a season, so I can open time and space for other new opportunities. At work, I am trying to be very careful about taking on new projects. I have a backlog of in-progress projects where I often feel like I am not contributing as much as I would like, and I want to finish those up before adding anything new.

I wish I were good at avoiding the need for purging. If I could evaluate each purchase, each possession, each opportunity more stringently as it came, I might end up with a more well-balanced life all together. But most of these items served a purpose at one point - but have no longer continued to do so. And harboring guilt about taking them on in the first place or in setting them free does no one any good.

So in this season of purging, I will try to let go of anything weighing me down. I wish I did not have to enter this cycle. But I will give myself grace in recognizing the need to move on.