I see a lot of references to decluttering on social media. Perhaps it's the circles I'm in; plus, of course, as soon as I clicked one link on the topic, I was inevitably going to see a whole lot more similar posts. Clutter is something of a divisive subject. There are people who like collecting a lot of things, and are comfortable around boxes, bags and other unsorted items. There are people who would like to be organised, but have difficulty finding spaces for things, or who don't have sufficent time and motivation to do anything about it.
There is also a third category of people who somehow manage to get things away, and tidy, without any apparent effort. I aspired to be one of those as a young adult, but was firmly in the second category. The spirit was willing - well, mostly - but I was working full-time, and then had small children. It was far more important to spend time with them - and they seemed to acquire a lot of stuff, too, mainly gifts from generous friends and family - than to keep the house tidy.
Moving to Cyprus in 1997 forced us to be quite radical about our stuff. We donated some things to charity shops, although we had a large room and a couple of closets full of things we had stored, in addition to what we brought out. We also stored a lot of things in a friend's garage. In subsequent years, we moved more and more things here (mainly books), and when we sold the UK house, we gave away a lot of things that we had not used for nine years, and evidently didn't need.
