I stumbled across The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and realized that my finding that book was no accident. I think I’ve been looking for it for a while; struggling to figure out why, despite having a large home, I never have room for anything. That question was answered straight away: I keep a great deal of stuff I don’t need.
I started cutting back on clutter this summer, hoping to affect my kids in some way. I’ve become increasingly aware of this responsibility I have as a father to set a good example for the boys around me and to be a really good person so that they know what being good looks like and hopefully make the decision to be good as well. This choice is more about keeping only what we need and gaining a better appreciation of what we have in the process. We do in fact have a lot of extraneous junk. I’m talking straight up trash–old pieces of leftover paper from cutouts and letters from stick on letter packs that were never used. This is solely the hall closet, mind you. I have a lot more to dig through before I hit the gold mine of stuff to get rid of.
It ought to take us a few weeks to really pare down, but this is the right way to go.