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Is that the sports jacket you wore to your cousin’s Bar Mitzvah in 1962 stuffed into the back of your closet?
Are those the red four-inch heels you bought to wear for your best friend’s wedding… in 2000? They hurt your feet then. Have you worn them since?
How about your once favorite brown sweater? The one you wore almost every day when you were a freshman in college. The very same one the moths have munched on for the last 10 years? Do you still wear that? Any chance you’re saving it for your next camping trip? Do you still camp?
Your closet is jam-packed with your past: the fun you had, the mistakes you made. The good, the bad, and the ugly moth-eaten sweater.
Let’s face it: Closets are dangerous. They have doors. Things can be hidden in them. No matter how good your intentions of one day dressing up again as your old self, your bell-bottomed, gypsy-skirted, and platform-shoed-lives stubbornly cling to those closets as reminders of glory days past.
Past. Not present.
Remember the time when you rushed home from work to make dinner because your in-laws were coming? You didn’t have time to really clean, so you did a quick pickup and tossed magazines, shoes, hats, scarves, dirty t-shirts, into the closet and closed the door? Are those things still in there? Maybe.
By the way, in the 19th century, the common word for that kind of hurry-up-and-hide cleaning process was called scurryfunge. It was used to describe a hasty tidying when a guest was coming, as in: I scurryfunge every time my mother-in-law comes for dinner.
It seems that the impulse to throw things in the closet to get them out of sight has been around for a long time.
All closets harbor secrets, but by far, the most frightening closets in any house are the ones that don’t have lights in them. Dark closets are the places where mittens get lost, once read books get tossed, and broken luggage gets stored. The smaller the closet, the bigger the problem. No one, not even the dog, wants to rummage around in the dust-encrusted bottom of a small dark closet looking for a smelly lost sneaker.
As we all know, if we are being honest with ourselves, big closets, even well-lit ones, are an open invitation to keep things that are WAY past their use-by date.
We have owned two turn-of-the-century homes. Both came sans closets. So, we built closets. Decent sized ones. Not our wisest decision.
What our lives would be like today if we had never built those closets? We would have been forced to hang all our clothing inside small wooden wardrobes, with our shoes paired neatly on the floor beside the bed. And if we had been forced, by not having any closets, to only own/wear/keep what would fit into that tidy bit of bedroom furniture?
Closets, however, are often the least offenders.
Heaven forbid if you have an attic or a basement…o r even a storage unit. Your life of gathering and keeping stuff will be forever doomed. How can you get rid of something if you have a place to store it?
I’m ready to clean out the past and shut the door on closets. How about you?
Enough keeping.
It’s time to let go.
Time to stop saving those things that are too tight or just plain too useless or ugly to keep.
It’s time to make some breathing room in your closets, your home, and your life.
