Your things are not your life...

I was just looking through some articles I had clipped when I first started my venture into professional organizing. Something I read really struck me as so simple and so important (then and now) that I wanted to share it here.

The weekly Washington Post Magazine has a regular column called "Making It". It highlights a person and the business they've started, usually after a previous career working for others. The subject of a column in December of 2007 was an organizer named Marcie Lovett. Here was her advice:

Don't buy anything to get organized; you probably have enough bins in your house. Your things are not your life; they're just things. Just because somebody gave it to you doesn't mean you have to keep it. Purge children's belongings before holiday or birthday deluges, but have the children do it with you, so they learn.

So simple, so true, but sometimes so hard to really accept and internalize and act upon. These are things I often think about around my own home and have passed along to friends, family members and clients. Thanks Marcie!