Time to declutter?

​It’s human nature to be hoarders. Thousands of years of human evolution has taken place without a row of shops in the high street or an out of town retail park to cater to our every need at most hours of the day. So humans have developed into hoarders, even if our modern day caves are overflowing with stuff. Witness the growth in ‘Self Storage’ facilities, a service that I am certain didn’t exist twenty years ago. How much ‘stuff’ do people have, that their homes are no longer enough and they need a portakabin sized extension, with lift access and on site security to keep their belongings? And for every organised, sensible person that realises that ‘extra storage space’ would come in handy, are there another dozen whose garage and sheds are rammed to the gunwales? Er…wait…yep that’d be me!
Across the winter months is a fine time for dive kit fettling. Just because the weather is less amenable to actual diving, doesn’t mean you have to spend your weekends doing something more useful. Non-diving partners will fail to see the logic in this argument. From their perspective you aren’t actually driving 2 hours to the dive boat to spend the day diving, therefore you must have time for a variety of other tasks, DIY, family visits, cinema trips, more DIY etc. The list of aspirations held by non-diving partners for days when you aren’t actually diving can be a long one. The length of their list is directly proportional to their lack of understanding about your love of all things scuba. The longer the list, the less they ‘get it’. Having established your weekly dive routine of disappearing from the household radar first thing on a Sunday morning and returning 12 hours later with an offering of fresh lobster, you must be very careful not to relinquish this time during the winter months.
So, what’s a diver to do when the weather is roaring in and the dive’s been blown out? It must be time to sort the dive kit. And this is a task that will take several blown out weekends. The longer you have been diving for, the more equipment you will have hoarded. If you are lucky enough to be the Equipment Officer in your branch then congratulations! You have an almost endless to-do list on behalf of your club. The act of ‘kit fettling’ on such a huge scale will ensure that your ‘dive time’ is protected as you justify needing to go to the clubhouse/pool/mate’s large shed where the club kit is stored by calling out “We need to have it ready for next season” as you head out the door.
I too have been sorting through kit. Dive centre equipment stores act like the extreme version of domestic garages and sheds. Who’d have thought we’d have not one but three Fenzi’s? Who knew that the kit box on the top shelf contained five two-piece wetsuits? And I think I need a bigger box for straps, clips and strange little bits of plastic that I can’t quite place, because I’m sure they’ll come in handy one day and I don’t want to throw them out yet. And there’s the rub, “it will come in handy one day.” I think I could make an absolute fortune if only I could learn to predict when that ‘one day’ moment will occur.
Our kit store should have a bench for kit preparation and rows of neatly stacked boxes.  In reality the amount of equipment in there means that the frequently used items are in on the floor in front of the storage boxes and the bench hasn’t seen daylight on its surface for months. Entering the kit store is like an archaeological project, everything is in layers relating to the time since its last use. The very act of tidying up is like a reverse trip down memory lane. But to combat the hoarding tendency requires more than tidying up. This requires a CLEAR OUT (cue dramatic music)!
There are three things required for a successful Clear Out. Firstly, you need to be in the right mood for it, ruthless, heartless, unsympathetic and a little cavalier. Who cares when ‘one day’ is likely to pop up? You need the space, you haven’t used this in 10 years and if you ever wanted to dive a horse collar again your mate has one you could borrow anyway. Secondly, you will make enormous progress in your decluttering if you think of a suitable recipient for the items that you want out of your way. Donating your old kit to the club means that it hasn’t actually gone, never to be used again. It still exists and you can get the philanthropic pleasure of knowing you donated it to a cause (and it will be the Equipment Officer’s problem now!). Thirdly, you need a reason to even start the clear out and what better reason than some new kit that needs pride of place in your dive emporium? Of course new kit won’t mean that you throw out the old stuff, not just yet, just in case… But perhaps you could clear out the kit you were wearing before the last set?