Conflicted

I am feeling overwhelmed and conflicted today.

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of junk in my house that needs to be sorted-purged-put away.

Conflicted about where to start.

Though the where-to-start problem was partially solved yesterday when Ron convinced me to move the desk from the pantry room (where it was buried under and behind a lot of junk) into the space by the kitchen. We then put the bar from that space into the pantry room. Now the pantry room is cleaner. And there is junk piled all over the TV room. And I have a nice desk near the kitchen.

I did the easiest cleaning up of this new junk pile yesterday. I also sorted the kids' artwork but ran out of pages for my kidzworxx albums and didn't get it all put away. But at least some progress was made. I ordered refill pages and think they should arrive by Wednesday.

Another item (or rather pile of items!) unearthed in this move was my completed scrapbooks. December 1999-October 2002. I had them on the coffee table yesterday but moved them to my desk last night when my friends were here for dinner. Today as I looked at the large stack of books I was feeling conflicted about the books. Why are they so big and heavy? Why do I have them? I'm going to have lots more before it's all said and done. What will I do with them all? Maybe I should stop scrapping.

Today I cleared off the shelf where I have been wanting to keep the scrapbooks so that the kids can look at them more often. I looked through the books as I put them on the shelf. I enjoyed looking at the pictures of the family. I enjoyed looking at my various layouts and styles. I'm glad I have them.

See -conflicted.

And now I am back to conflicted about what to do next. Every single little bit of this all-consuming junk is overwhelming me. It's the time involved. When I look at it, all I see is the vast amounts of time it will take to deal with it. And I feel discouraged and quite certain that I'll never finish. Not only that but that I will most certainly spend many hours and have not much to show for it.

Not enough time.

Just not enough time.

But I really want to have it done. I can envision the freedom and peacefulness I will feel when I'm done. Even though I know I'll never really be Done because clutter control is an on-going task, I am at the moment about 10 years behind in the process and not feeling peaceful at all.

I don't know what Ron sees when he looks around.

I see time. Or a lack thereof.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So now I'm going to go back downstairs and try to take another nibble from the elephant.