A wrinkle in time

9/29/09 Dress shirt, trashed

Follow this line of thinking: A stained shirt, discarded, demonstrates how the Downsizing Challenge is giving me new eyes on the world. Here's my reasoning:

The shirts and pants in my closet fall into two categories:

1) The shirts and pants I wear all the time. Those are the no-iron, no-wrinkle clothes.

2) The shirts and pants I don't wear. Those need to be ironed.

The in-need-of-ironing clothes are just as good as the other ones, they are just too wrinkly to wear. Since I have far more important things to do than iron, they just hang there, taking up half the space.

Now, in the days before downsizing, I accepted this as a fact of life. Each morning I opened the closet and, deep in the back of my mind, thought "Hmmm, can't wear those, they aren't ironed. But, they are perfectly good, so I should just leave them there. Now, let me put on that shirt I've already worn twice this week. At least it's wrinkle free!"

But, sixty days into the challenge, my eyes are now seeing things differently. Suddenly, perfectly good clothes that I don't wear aren't so perfectly good. If I'm not going to use them, I should get rid of them.

This morning, I put on one of those shirts I never wear. No, I didn't iron it first, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. If it was too good to get rid of, then I better use it.

It turns out it wasn't too good to get rid of.

Just before I headed out the door, I glanced in the mirror and realized that there was a huge stain on the pocket. A minute later it was in the garbage and I was back to a wrinkle-free shirt.

For a year, that shirt hung in my closet, and it likely would have stayed there for another year. I held onto it only because it had become invisible. Well, now my eyes have been opened. All those wrinkled clothes better watch out.