A friend of mine came over to my apartment around March and asked me how I keep my apartment from being bombarded with stuff. A really nice compliment because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking, "Why do I have so much stuff? Am I secretly a hoarder?"
Every season I do a clean out of things in my apartment. Most of the time, this activity deals with the cleansing and refreshing of: clothes, refrigerated goods, pantry items, and the most accessible storage closet I have. What this means is that I have a storage closet that is massively piled with "just in case" goods, bookcases I have not reorganized, technology items that have been shoved into boxes, and so much more. I figured that if I wanted to recharge my batteries and situate myself in a space that felt new and refreshed, I needed to cleanse my physical space of habitation.
So I cleaned. Everything.
It wasn't the seasonal type of cleaning. It was a wipe out of everything in my apartment. It took me 3 days to go through everything from room to room and throughout the activity I was met with many thoughts.
"Why do I still have this?"
"Will I need this in the future?"
"I wonder if they make these anymore."
"How can I go about changing my activity around this?"
... and so much more.
When it was all said and done (which really means I decided that a first round was successful) I slept even better that night. However, there will be a round 2.
I heard about a book called "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" by Marie Kondo and I plan on reading it while in Copenhagen. We'll see what happens.