GREETINGS from the land of the Great Ganges, hope that you have all woken up to beautiful Sunday and are rested and ready to face the challenges and opportunities that Monday brings.
A couple of months I profiled a person that I consider a close acquaintance and friend, her name is Nasra Karl. I previously worked with her when she worked for a hotel in Dar es Salaam and she later decided to start her own business related to decluttering and arrangement of houses, homes and offices.
I know, I thought the same thing when she first told me about and after she explained it to me, I realized it was a much needed service and the whole idea was out of the box.
You may wonder what is so unique or special about decluttering. Well for starters, it has the advantage of enabling you to concentrate better. When there’s a bunch of junk on my desk, it is almost impossible to get anything done.
But if you take a second to remove the extra papers, and put everything at right angles (you know how that goes), then you find myself able to start typing away almost immediately. I don’t know about you but decluttering has a way of making you sleep a lot better.
According to Today.com, “A new sleep study has found that people who doze in cluttered rooms and are at high risk for developing hoarding disorder are more likely to have sleeping problems. This includes having trouble falling asleep at night and experiencing rest disturbances.” Decluttering also has the advantage of enabling one to forget their past.
This however depending on which side of the fence you are standing in. This is actually what I want to talk about today. A part of me is thankful that I am also able to learn so much about decluttering from Nasra but at the same time hoped that I had acquired the knowledge earlier because in one way or another, I would have got tips on how to preserve some memories that I didn’t want to completely get rid of.
I know it sounds confusing but you will get the idea before I pen off. While I buy the idea that decluttering is helpful to one’s health, I think it is equally important to know what ‘trash’ to throw away and what to learn. Let me give you a fine example. When I was in primary school I was a stamp collector and I had stamps from countries near and far.
I had stamps of countries I had never heard of but they gave me an idea of what the country was about. Thanks to the electronic age today, stamps have almost gone obsolete and to most people have no meaning.
I am sure if I was to give a stamp to my daughter; she would see as just another paper but if I showed it to my nephew, I would be bombarded with so many questions, might end up looking shallow minded.
Of late I have been thinking a lot about my stamp albums and my entire collection and blaming myself for not having been a forward looking person. If I had acquired the decluttering skills earlier, I would have known what to keep and what to throw.
If I was a forward thinking person who regarded everything to have a value in future, I would have ensured I kept the stamps safely away. I may not be talking for the whole of the population but I think a big chunk of our population are not forward looking people, for many of us, now is everything.
Sometime ago, one of my nephews found an audio tape in the house and he went up to his dad to find out what it was, for all he, it could have an explosive device. Anyway, his dad after losing a few hairs on his head managed to explain how the gadget worked and how it can ‘store’ music.
I think the fact that there are so few museums for certain themes is an indicator that we are forward looking by nature. I know for a fact in some countries they have all sorts of museums like modern art, war, locomotive and even museum of sex and toilets.
Tanzania as a country has so many unique things and many are vanishing, without preserving them, will be depriving future generations to learn something about their country.
Cheerio.
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