I'm continuing with critical reorganizing of my office closet with the goal of effective aging-in-place. Here's what my closet is teaching me:

1) One of the dangers of aging in our homes is that we become curators of our lifetime collection of mementos and leftovers of past careers, hobbies, family events, etc. These passive leftovers take up space. The space of our homes becomes more and more occupied by this collection.

2) The space available for current active living is crowded and cramped by the passive collection.
Our identities may be caught up in our collection, but unless we have unlimited space we must make difficult judgements between our need for memorabilia and our need for ease of meeting our current needs.

3) These decisions can be exhausting and they are not going to get easier. In a time of illness they could exact a real cost of limited life energy.

4) For my office I want to discard things which I really don't need anymore and keep things which have a reasonable chance of being useful over the rest of my life. The ones I will need and use now should be as front, forward, available and easy to reach. I need to value easy-to-use space and avoid crowding.

So I'm still working on my closet and bookshelves. Three shopping bags of old papers are thrown out. Two file drawers are emptied and all file cabinets are easy to access. Now I need to reorganize the file drawers to best serve my current life needs.