Clutter happens....

.... by not by itself.  Clutter always has a lot of help.

I was down at a neighbor's house this morning, looking through boxes of a collection put together by the neighbor's wife who passed away a couple of years ago.  This wasn't the first time I'd been down at his house, and this was surely not the first of his deceased wife's collections.  She had lots of stuff, most of which wasn't even on display in their home.. it had been packed away in boxes since the 1950s.

Now, how sad is that?!

If you're going to collect something, then at least give it some respect.  Keep it on display, use it, enjoy it, and if you're tired of it all (or just tired of dusting everything) then give it away. Plain and simple... give it away. There are probably family members who may like to have something of yours before you go to that big antique shop in the sky. And surely you may have friends who would like part of your collection just to have a little reminder of your friendship.

And if that doesn't suit you, then box up what you truly don't want, and donate it to a thrift shop whose profits will help the local charities in your town. There is always something you can do with unwanted items instead of just letting them sit in dark boxes in a dark attic. Have a big yard sale, for goodness sake, and use the money you make on your no-longer-wanted collections to take a day-trip... or if it's a really big and profitable yard sale, you could make enough money to arrange a weekend getaway.

No matter how long you live, all of your collections are not going with you when you go. And for as long as you're living, do you really want to live in a cluttered home that's packed with things that you haven't unpacked for decades?  If you haven't unpacked those boxes, then I feel justified in saying that you don't want and don't need those things. As this neighbor's collection stands, I picked out what I could sell in my shop, the proceeds will be split with the neighbor, and the majority of the stuff his wife collected over the years is going into a big yard sale next month.

Keep in mind that whoever gets to "go through" your decades-packed boxes after you've gone... they're going to be standing there, box after blessed box, shaking their heads and tsk-tsking and saying "What on earth was she thinking?!?!"

Live nice. Don't clutter up your life.