In the early 1980s, my husband and I bought a lovely Oriental rug that graced our dining room for many years. It was a big purchase for us, back when we had two incomes and no kids, and we really loved that rug.

Yesterday he asked me whatever happened to that rug, and I couldn’t remember. We bought it for our first house, but it didn’t really have a place in our second house, which was fully carpeted, and so we put it in the basement, and then…what? We must have gotten rid of it during our big downsizing ten years ago, but neither of us remember what we did with it.

It’s funny how you can have possessions that you love a lot, that you don’t think you’ll ever get rid of, but then you do, and over time you forget what even happened to them. This is an important point to realize and remember when you need to declutter your home, because you’re forced to, like we were, or because it just really needs to be done, and you’re having a hard time letting go of things.

The truly important things in your life are people, not things. Everything else is expendable, and someday you won’t even remember what you did with most of your stuff. I wish I’d known that when I was younger; decluttering wouldn’t have been such an enormous, time-consuming project!