As a keen observer of the ebb and flow of migrant birds and other seasonal indicators, I was interested to note the return of Kathy Thomas this week. We also cheered (jeered?) Gerry Willard who had moulted out of his winter drabs into the finer shorts-of-summer attire. I suspect it won’t be long before we’ll be hearing the happy spring songs of the likes of John Allinotte ,Doug Brown and Eric Anderson; I hope so anyway. It’s nice to know summer is on its way.
Gerry Willard is recruiting good folks to help with his annual clean-up of the Appleby Line, QEW interchange. It’s on Saturday April 25th, meet at 9 a.m at the SW corner. You will, or at least should, have received an email of encouragement about this from Gerry.
I don’t know about other scribes, but when I’m covering the morning’s speaker presentation, rather than try to record a blow-by-blow account, I look for an essential thread, theme or colour. Well today‘s speaker sure gave us colour; he was very entertaining. He was Stephen Ilot, a one-time CBC executive who decided one day to call it quits and trysomething new. He now de-clutters for a living, he calls it domestic archeology; although a lot of it sounds more like marriage counseling.
Unless you live like a Kalahari Bushman/woman, you have ‘stuff’, stuff you haven’t touched for years – maybe decades, but ‘stuff’ that you are convinced is essential to your identity; actually much of it can go.
The colour I found in Stephen’s talk lay in his abundant use of similes. Describing how to get rid of all the outgrown ‘stuff’ abandoned by growing teens, he painted a picture of the kids ‘lying on the couch like boneless chickens’. You can picture it can’t you?
And there was a client, so delirious with the newfound open space in her home that she became like Julie Andrews on a Swiss hilltop dance. His message was all about getting rid of what doesn’t serve your life any more; cue ‘The Hills are Alive”.
I guess we’ve all done it, taken in-hand that ‘thing’ and half way through the wind-up, held back: Y’never know when it might be needed (yes, never); The kids might like it (they won’t); It might be valuable (to whom?)
There is also the Tyranny of Gifts and the same test applies, does it still serve your life? (Did it ever serve your life?) And buffet hutches? – no-one wants them, they have no value, and there’s a glut on the market. Ditto Aunt Molly’s silverware, or maybe it’s really electroplated.
Within Stephen’s own domestic life they have a shopping mantra, MSYDN, it comes from the wisdom of his Polish mother-in-law; “Most stuff you don’t need” MSYDN.
But where do you send it all, this un-needed stuff? If you just can’t put it out with the heavy garbage pick-up, then here is a lead:
Finally, before I “Drift off like an un-tethered dirigible” (Stephen Ilot. 2015) if you want to know more about Stephen then check his website
www.decluttering.ca
P Scribe.
