A short  blog this week but a ground breaking week for me in many ways...
Now that I am paying a monthly lease for my new business premises, I am feeling incredibly guilty about the mountains of paperwork I still have stacked in my spare room!  10 x 50L boxes of paper to be exact! 
Apart from the environmental impact of all that paper, quite literally thousands of trees, those piles represent 12 years of my teaching materials from my work as a primary school teacher, English as a second language teacher here, in the UK and in Europe, and press cuttings from my days in public relations in the early 90s! 
The classroom materials include hours upon hours of lesson planning notes for science lessons,  music lessons, English lessons, all painstakingly researched to ensure that they were the most engaging as possible. There are also scores of ‘we’ll miss you Mrs Harvey’ cards, events posters, certificates, birthday cards from ex-colleagues, all colourful little memories neatly filed away for that someday when they are once again important.
For that reason I have never raised the courage to even think about sorting through the piles, and perhaps even reducing them! But recently I have realised two things. First, someday never comes and spending your life waiting for it is wasteful. Far better to live in the moment. And secondly, I can’t imagine not running my little business, spending my days improving the learning skills of my students, so why am I holding on to a past that will never be repeated?
So earlier this week I woke up to thinking ‘today is the day I sort this stuff and pay for extra storage’. And then moments later I became even bolder and thought ‘hang on, am I seriously contemplating paying to store things I will never need again? I now run my own business and I have all the materials I need. Worse case scenario I can find anything that I am missing on the net in seconds.’
So the next big question was ‘Am I ever going to return to a classroom of 30 kids?’  A few coffees in my sunny garden later weighing the pros and cons and the resounding answer was ‘NO!’ 
So here’s how the rest of the morning looked. By 11am I had filled two, yes two, yellow recycling bins and emptied the 10 x 50L boxes. Now all I have left are some amazing books that I just can’t bear to throw away so I’m going to try and sell on Ebay to raise money for my chosen charity, CanDo4Kids.
Has anyone out there ever had a clear out like this and lived to regret it, or was it, as I dearly hope mine will be, a cleansing experience?