Resolutions 2015: AppRes/15/0105

We've not been doing any resolutions because: it never gets resolved by year end.

And apparently when we do plan for resolutions it turns out to be for stuff that requires organizing ie album art, scanning photos to digital copies. As it is these kinda of organising work never ends. When we think of how we want to reorganize our photos from our iPhone to our Mac, renaming them and then moving them to separate folders...we're not fully sold onto iPhoto (not to mention how iPhoto isn't getting any more love with Yosemite and iOS8).

So. Let's try for this year.

We are aware that we're quite the hoarder: memorabilia and souvenirs are one thing but having that mentality of 'we should keep this, we should be able to repurpose this in the future' meant we have lots of used papers (to re-use as rough notepaper), ribbons from presents (for future presents if the ribbons match the wrapping and is long enough), the packages of things we've bought (we're staring at our hard drive boxes as we type this), pamphlets and magazines and reading materials and...gah. Our tabletops never really get to enjoy being left clear of things.

We are aware as to why we hoard: we're aware our memory isn't the clearest and so we tend to keep lots of stuff to remind us of things we've done, places we've been to, things to do...

Only, we're never great at clearing away stuff that can be cleared away once we don't need it any more. We were holding on to brochures and marketing aids about oral contraceptives from 9 years ago, for goodness sake! Every time we think, oh, we should read this up again one day, and yeah that day never did came.

And that's a topic that was brought up in Marie Kondo's book: not knowing how to let go off stuff you don't use any more. Better yet is how it also mentions about how some of these stuff, instead of being discarded, gets given away to someone else (who may not want it either) to dispel some of that notion that you are being wasteful by getting rid of something still useful. So when it comes to cleaning now we have a slight awareness that we really ought to just throw away stuff that we know we would keep but would never use. If we need it rarely (or if ever) we can just get a new one then. We shouldn't need to thank every single thing for its purpose before discarding, because we don't want to anthropomorphize everything in our life.

Thus our resolution this year would be to tidy up our workspace. Because we really do spend a lot of time at our table and honestly it would be nice if we have the space to wrap stuff again without having to shift the mess about.

It's just too bad that there's no way we can get rid of everything that doesn't spark joy from our worktable.