Treasure Reverence
When my eldest (now 13) began preschool, we entered the “bringing papers home from school” phase of parenting. Every scribble was put in her backpack and then carefully placed by her on my kitchen counter. One day she saw me not-so-sneakily toss the pile of papers in the recycle bin and she, horrified, cried that all of those papers were special and shouldn’t be thrown away. My response to her was, “if everything is special, then nothing is special.” I explained to her that I do look at the papers she brings home and if there are ones that I believe are truly special, I hang onto them, and the rest get tossed. I simply didn’t have enough space (or the desire) to hold onto every little project she made at school. Now that we’re 4 kids deep and live in a smaller home, there’s absolutely no world in which I could keep all of the papers my kids bring home from school on a daily basis. I still look through all of them and hang onto the ones that I find special (writing their name in a new way, a handprint, a silly picture they drew or phrase they wrote that I want to remember, etc), but most of them wind up in the recycle bin. The first time one of my sons brought home a 100% on a test, he asked if we could hang it on the fridge for a while because he was proud of it. We did, and then when it was no longer exciting, it ended up in the bin too. I was once called “heartless” by someone who learned that I throw away most of their schoolwork (and all of their baby teeth), but the reality is I’m quite sentimental - I just know what I find valuable enough to hang onto and what I don’t, and I’m not going to waste time and space on saving things that don’t matter a lot to me.
Here at House Peace we have a phrase we often use called treasure reverence, which is the process of discerning what is meaningful to us (a treasure) and treating it as such. There’s a misconception that all home organizers are minimalists and that we don’t support people having “stuff.” The truth is, you might be surprised to see that in our homes there are things like rock collections, full bookshelves, full closets, and bins of sentimental items from our children. We have simply decided that these things hold value to us and we’d like to hang onto them while letting go of the things that don’t hold value to us. As previously mentioned, I don’t keep baby teeth because I think it’s kind of icky but I do keep a few favorite articles of clothing from different baby and toddler sizes of my children because they hold incredible memories for me. The teeth take up far less room and from an organizational perspective are much easier to deal with, but they hold no meaning to me, so they’ve been discarded, and the handful of baby clothes I’ve kept have been carefully stored in the attic.
After discerning what is a treasure to you, the next and equally as important step in treasure reverence is to honor those items by displaying or storing them properly. It is a waste and frankly very sad when someone discovers something meaningful to them that has been ruined due to improper storage. Depending on what your treasure is, there might be a very specific way that it should be kept while not in use, or it’s possible that your treasure would be best honored by being on display. My sister has hung onto a few items from our late grandparents such as their mantle clock and wedding picture, and she likes to keep them on display in her home vs putting them in a box in the attic so she can look at them regularly and enjoy them. If you have a collection, is there a way that your collection can be on display? If you love cookbooks, is there an open shelf in your kitchen where you can see and access them easily? Displaying your treasures is such a beautiful way to honor them.
Clothing being hung properly is a simple, everyday example of Treasure Reverence
One of our favorite things to do on an organizing job is help people unearth and honor their treasures by clearing out items that have no meaning (remember junk discernment?), and helping them honor those items. If you’d like our help with this, you can inquire about in-person organization help here. We’d love to help!
Happy treasure-hunting!
— Colleen
PS. You can get to know me and my family a little more here!