The flip side of simplicity

You'd think that simplifying my life would involve less work than normal, right? After all, work is a complicated thing, so it just stands to reason that making things simple would make things easier.

Not if you've been living in a complcated mess for years!

In striving for a simple life, I first have to start picking up the pieces of my old life, tidying them up, and storing them where they need to go. This can be the very opposite of simple when you've got years of crap to sort through.

And I don't just mean physical crap, though that is a huge part of it. Right now, I've got an apartment full of junk that needs wading through. We need a storage room to put a lot of the boxes that have things that we need or want but don't have room to keep around without having boxes piled five feet high in our hallway. Somne of those boxes are filled with things we legitimately don't need, things that were thrown in there in a hurry during our last move. Things that we needed but couldn't find and so bought another of. So much stuff, and it's toxic!

Not the possessions themselves, but how they are kept, how they are used or not used. Seeing the high piles of boxes in this place is an energy suck. It makes one feel tired just to see them, because you know just how much work is going to have to go into sorting it all out. You feel defeated before you even begin.

Or, to put it more accurately, I feel defeated before I begin. Which is why this stuff is still sitting around after 4 years.

But not all the crap to wade through is physical. Some of it is mental, and by that, I mean my attitude. I'm not a get-up-and-go person by nature. I am, in actuality, something of a lazy person. I enjoy sitting on my behind with a good book in my hands, putting off housework until tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe next week... You can see where the problem lies.

So in simplifying my life, first I have to make it way more complicated. I have to clean up, both inside and out. I'm used to this way of thinking, though. When I was young, and my parents told me to clean my bedroom, I always knew it had to get messier before it got tidier, because I'd have to sort through things, move stuff around, all that jazz. It would see like hours passed with no progress made, but then nearly everything would be finished fifteen minutes later!

And once the major complication of tidying is over, the rest is just maintenance, which is much easier. It's a lot easier to make yourself wash the dishes when you know there's only a few plates and some cutlery to clean. It's really hard when you know you've got about 5 or more loads piled up on the counter because you got slack.

I did get slack this past month, with just about everything. Cleaning and cooking fell by the wayside. Last week I gave myself a bit of a pass, since I started working again, but that's no excuse for the three weeks before that! Some food has spoiled in the fridge. Lots of dishes need washing. Laundry needs doing. The floor by the front door needs a good sweeping and mopping.

In addition to the zillion and a half other chores that need doing around here.

Tonight is the night we put the garbage out. I'll get rid of the spoiled food, at the very least, and wash some clothes for the rest of the work week. If I have time and energy (work was tiring today), I'll see about washing up some of those dirty dishes. I'd much rather spend the evening reading, but I know, when I remember to remember, that there are more important things I can be doing with my time.