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It was a stumble out of the gate to “soft cull” my possessions this spring. Not the hard cull necessitated by downsizing or moving. And not (yet) the final sort, what the Swedish call ��ö����ä��Ծ��Բ���or death cleaning, meant to spare the people left behind the boredom and sad helplessness of going through one life’s accumulation. Author Deborah Levy found it unbearable and strange to “see my stepmother’s shirts, scarves and trousers neatly folded in drawers,” she wrote in Real Estate. Reading that,��my own mother’s tidy arrangements of slippers, slips and hair curlers came back to me. Things from a gone generation that no one wants. Where have all the hair curlers gone? These are the kinds of questions a culler must not get bogged down in.

I like a clean sweep and always have. As I write this, I can hardly keep myself from tackling my bedside table drawer, in which things procreate in the night. Monday the drawer is as spartan as an empty shoe box. Friday, it’s Value Village all over again. Understanding how this happens is for greater minds than mine.��

But as I cross into my seventies, I’ve been thinking more about what we keep, what we pass along, and why. The things we hold onto also hold our feelings, this is true. But the feelings we hold onto hold onto us. Sorting out when to let go of the feeling is illuminating work. Culling��is a kind of flow, or can be, a continuous process of understanding who you were, who you are, and who you might yet be. It’s an act of hope for the future, however old you are.��

In that spirit, I share my recent thinking on moving things along.��

Have a garage sale

Ha, ha, ha. Under no circumstances have a garage sale. A couple of years ago, in a secret bid to get my kids to clear their stuff out of the basement, we lugged everything out front to sell/giveaway. Many came, few took. Young people have no room, old people are in their own desperate culls.

Ignore culling tips (except mine)

For an easy win, start with something contained and manageable like your fridge, advised the New York Times Wirecutter. But that’s not culling, that’s just avoiding food poisoning. There’s the , where you slalom from one side of the room to the other. “If you try to go straight down, the steep angle feels scary,” whereas traversing takes you “down the mountain without even noticing.” I attempted to slalom a steep mogul run in Whistler many years ago. After an hour of skiing across the mountain at the exact same angle, my husband took off our skis and walked down to the lift with me. There’s the four-box method (keep, throw away, donate, sell), the 50-50 method, and the 12-12-12, all variations on the same theme that involves too much counting. I did follow the one-in-one-out system, removing like for like objects with each new purchase, which my son once advised. “I never would have suggested such a thing,” he said recently when I gave him a one-out frying pan. “That’s bonkers.” You can even pack everything you own as if you’re moving, and get rid of what you don’t box, speaking of bonkers.

Keep it private and personal����

My stumble with the vases had two problems. The first was that it put my daughter and daughter-in-law in an awkward position of competition, which neither of them had asked for. When my Aunt Mary was about the age I am now, she’d present a tray of jewelry for me and my sisters to choose what we’d like to be left in her will. The available responses were to become greedy and competitive or to refuse to participate. In both cases, everyone felt bad, the opposite of what my aunt was trying to accomplish (I think).

The second problem with my vase flotilla was that I didn’t think about which vase suited which person best and why. This doesn’t have to be high moral ground. The more a thing suits someone, the likelier you are to succeed in culling it. Handing off piles of clothes, books and household paraphernalia rarely flys: more and more, people recoil from the random download.

Be spontaneous

In 2013, Star reporter Raveena Aulakh wrote a world-changing series about the children sewing our disposable clothing in a Bangladesh sweatshop. Raveena went undercover as a garment worker alongside Meem, her nine-year-old boss who made $32 a month working from 9 a.m. to 9 pm. When Raveena said something nice about Meem’s plastic bracelet, Meem immediately took it off and gave it to her. I don’t have Meem’s generosity and grace, far from it. But I think about her spontaneous gift, mostly when I choose to hold onto something with that primitive schoolyard impulse — it’s mine, not yours. We can’t take it with us is a useful reminder.

Give people carte blanche with your possessions

If I was serious about getting rid of things, I needed to get out of the way. “Go into my closet and take whatever you want,” I’ve begun saying to a friend’s niece or daughter, or my own younger relatives. I have many good clothes, and now that I no longer go into work every day, I don’t wear half of them. The open invitation felt risky: what if they picked that black jacket I love? Except I have four black jackets I love, so that’s the point. When one woman chose a couture dress that has a terrific story attached to it — 90 per cent off at Nordstrom Rack is the short version — I hesitated, and it was almost the vases all over again. I will keep my mother’s golden vase, not just for the lily of the valley, but because it held the flowers beside her urn after she died. That’s a story her vase keeps close. The story of the dress — and the dress itself, now a bit too short for me — doesn’t need keeping.��

Imbuing everything with meaning can make nothing truly meaningful

“People get caught up in the fear that if they let something go that is sentimental, that they will forget the memory,” Selena Jones, an Ontario therapist who coaches decluttering, told ��But our memories live inside us, she added, not in our things. Mostly they do. I’m not sure if the ringing laughter of my sisters-in-law at a long-gone cottage would come back to me if I didn’t keep the tiny silver canoe that reminds me of that August��afternoon.��

August afternoon.��

Culling is a personal process. Only you know what to keep

Don’t get judgy with yourself about the things you hold onto (unless it’s a pair of socks with holes; then seek help). A friend of mine — the most ferocious culler I know, and that’s saying a lot given my own propensity — keeps a length of black silk a long-dead boyfriend gave her 50 years ago. He was the coach of the men’s national volleyball team and took them to China. “It was a pretty exotic thing to do in 1975. And it seemed like a very special present, made of expensive material like nothing I’d ever had at 17.” Jump ahead to 2025, the length of silk is folded over a tube hanger in her sparsely populated bedroom closet.��“With every rental and house purchase, I’ve kept this length of silk. I have no idea why, or what to do with it.”

I filled a small wastebasket with bits of wrappers, empty vitamin containers, and batteries from my bedside drawer. In the back of the��drawer was the small chain I’d taken from my mother’s bedside table 10 years earlier. The other obstinate, everyday, end-of-life stuff — her glasses and watch, Vaseline and cards — we threw away, but the chain I kept. I thought it must be one of those hopscotch chains from when she was a child, so much better than a stone, she taught me, because a chain doesn’t bounce when you throw it on a square.��I held it in front of me as I finished decluttering my own drawer, when another, smaller chain tangled inside it fell to the floor. What were the things in my drawer getting up to in the night, making new baby chains? Maybe my children will ask the same questions when they find the two chains or they’ll toss them out,��not��knowing the hopscotch story they carried.

I put the chains back and closed the drawer.

Is there something you’ve never been able to throw out? Let us know in the comments.