I know you have it.
It’s a pile of stained and holey shirts that have been demoted to the category of “what if I need it for ____.” Fill in the blank with painting, gardening, removing old carpet, cleaning out the chicken coop, etc.
Yes, it is good to have some service-level, natty-tatty duds for the moment when you have to pull the treasures down from Grandma’s attic for her. Really, though, do you need such a huge pile?
That’s a rhetorical question.
Let me tell you the tale of the husband who collected rags—a story graciously supplied by a woman at one of my presentations.
Said husband—let’s call him Greg—grew up in a family where t-shirts never wore out, they simply were born again as rags. Perhaps you, too, were raised in a family of t-shirt reincarnaters, where the secrets of cutting up t-shirts and tightie-whities and socks without elasticity were passed down from generation to generation.
(To be fair, white cotton t-shirts do make lovely cleaning rags and car oil-changing wiper-uppers. Also, please know that I fully support the idea of reducing, reusing, and recycling—just not to the extent that it paralyzes a person to move forward.)
Greg was a 30-something with the heart of an older, wiser man. His wife, who we will call Ginny, was a 30-something mother who was fed up (insert exclamation point and fist pump) with stuff being everywhere.
She wished for ways to simplify her household. At times, she imagined having a burn bin to make simplifying more straight-forward. Alas, her town did not allow burn bins.
Ginny grew up in a family that did not practice t-shirt-to-rag rebirth.
Ginny felt quite bothered that Greg insisted on turning every yellowy-armpit, worn-out tee into a “garage rag.” In fact, she suspected that Greg was never going to use those rags because he didn’t change his own oil and he was mostly not handy with tools.
When Ginny confronted Greg about his lack of logic, Greg got defensive. Ginny was not surprised. She said something mean about Greg’s parents, which Greg did not appreciate.
You might think that having an enormous pile of rags in the garage is not such a big deal. For Ginny, it felt like an easy place to start simplifying since she couldn’t get people to stop buying her kids so many gosh-darn toys and her sweet little ones left a trail of things wherever they walked.
“What can I do?” she pleaded to me.
“Your husband has a case of the what ifs,” I told her. “That means he is used to doing things based on just in case situations.”
I explained that the best way to deal with “what if” scenarios is to do some truth-testing and to set a boundary on the keep pile. Rather than look at Greg as the enemy, she could try to enlist him in the process by asking about where the t-shirt-to-rag thing came from. That meant not being snide, and instead, truly being curious about Greg’s experience. As Greg would tell the story, he could realize that t-shirt-to-rag reincarnation was something that had—at some point—been created to solve a problem.
Ginny could then ask how Greg sees their family using rags and what number could solve their rag needs.
In a magical world, if Ginny could stay curious and open, and Greg could have a full stomach and a good night’s sleep, he might reply with a number that fits for them (not his parents or his parents’ parents).
It could be that simple.
Let’s say that you are doing this process for yourself.
Ask yourself, where did I get the idea that I cannot discard old clothes? How did I decide how many I must keep? How often am I doing tasks where I need these old clothes? How many should I keep to manage those tasks?
Be curious about yourself rather than just accepting the automatic “what if” response.
Your solution could be quite easy.
You won’t even need a rag to wipe up the mess.
May all your rag piles be reasonable,
Kate Varness, CPO-CD, COC, MA, Green Light Organizing and Coaching
P.S. Get your copy of Kate’s book, Who Am I Now? Realign Your Home and Life on Amazon.
P.S.S. Schedule your complimentary strategy session with Kate to find out more about clearing your internal clutter. https://schedulewithKateVarness.as.me/
