From Mountain to Molehill

I'm going through boxes of junk (mostly old papers like magazine articles I tore out so that I could refer to them again . . . someday). They're all still stacked in my room from years ago; but before I could get to them, I had to clear out all the junk on top of them. I'm finding layers of dust on all the boxes, they've been there so long. And the longer the box has been sitting there, the thicker the "dust cover."

It used to take me a long time to go through a box. I had a hard time letting go of stuff that might come in handy down the road, when my life would magically turn into a fairy tale and I would live happily ever after. Nowadays, I've got a much better handle on reality. I'm not as tempted to bring home slick brochures or steal magazines from waiting rooms. I recycle magazines now, instead of ripping out half the articles. And instead of tearing out whole articles, I might clip a paragraph or a recipe . . . or I might leave it in the dang magazine. It's much easier to Google something up, even a recipe, than to dig through boxes trying to find an article.

So going through these old boxes, while not exactly a snap, at least takes a lot less time than it used to. I'm finding out that most of the junk I "collected" was a pointless waste of time and storage space. Most of it is going directly to the recycling bin. Very little of it is currently useful to me. Of the papers I had stuffed into the last box, I wound up with only a half-inch stack. Sheesh. Very soon, the filing system I have always wanted to establish won't seem like such a monumental task. I doubt it'll be much trouble at all to file a mere foot of papers instead of boxes and boxes and boxes.