It was in July, earlier this year, that I finally gathered enough motivation to begin a decluttering project. It is an annual tradition that I try to keep up and stretches over a few weekends. But more often than not, after a few days of cleaning out and getting the most visible spaces in order, my spirits wane. I slip into a lethargy from which I can rarely drive myself back on track. This year wouldn’t have been any different had I not found motivation to go on, in the strangest way possible. 

 I was already a couple of weekends in. The house had started looking much better and I was on the verge of calling it quits. One last drawer maybe, I told myself, surveying a drawer that I did not remember opening more than twice in the last five years. I knew roughly what was in there – a tangle of cables and wires that I had saved over the years, thinking that it would come in handy some time. That “some time” hadn’t come yet and I decided I could put the drawer to better use than that. It would be easy to deal with anyway – one dump into the garbage bag and I’d be done. So, I bunched up all the wires and cables, prepared to throw them into the garbage bag, when I saw something and my heart skipped a beat. Something I was convinced was long lost. My MP3 Player. It was the sleek black DJ to all the parties I once held in my room. A wave of nostalgia came crashing down on me.  

  The year was 2012. I had just turned 12 and my parents had gifted me what I consider one of their best birthday presents – an 8GB digital MP3 Player. They had good reason to get me one – I loved listening to music all the time and I didn’t have a phone yet. And music blasting from a radio all day long was a nuisance they had had enough of. As I held it in my hand now – a small, modest device, only the size of my closed fist – I remembered how big a part of my life it had been. Snatches of the songs I used to love came back to me, and I saw myself, in my old room, dancing away, not a care in the world. It had been my best and most comforting companion. Until 2017, that is. When I got my first smartphone. My MP3 player struggled to compete with the lure of the worlds that my smartphone lay open in front of me. It had to eventually give up when YouTube whisked me away into its rabbit holes and unlimited reservoir of songs. I would still go back to it from time to time when the internet was down or when I got too impatient with the buffering and the ads. But slowly, just like that, it withdrew from its place on my table to the dark recesses of one of the drawers. One day, a year or so after we had moved houses, I realised with a pang that I did not know where it was. I launched a frantic search, first of many, only to conclude that I had probably lost it. And that’s what I had believed until two months back, when I held it in my hand. I could’ve sworn I had searched that drawer before.  

  Finding the MP3 Player had two great benefits. None of them to do with the device itself, which I safely put back in my now tidy drawer. For all the cords and wires that I had saved, I hadn’t managed to save the charging cable of the MP3 Player and I couldn’t get it to work. But the time capsule brought back many fond memories. Of simpler times, of slower days. I finally picked up my phone and called my best friend from childhood, something I had been putting off for too long, blaming busy schedules. When we hung up about two hours later, I realised that if life didn’t give me moments to pause and breathe, I must take it for myself, that I’d be all the better for it. And two, I got inspired. The dopamine rush had helped. I moved on to another doomed drawer and in the weeks following, I managed to clear out most of the spaces that I had always dreaded attending to, buoyed by the hope that I could come across more forgotten treasures. I didn’t find much, none so exciting as my MP3 Player anyway. But I do have more space to spare in my home now. A win is a win.