I was lucky enough to grow up in a very uncluttered home, which was simultaneously a blessing/curse situation. If there was anything in that house that wasn’t necessary—little picture frames and maybe a few Hummel figurines aside—it was dispatched with extreme prejudice. Mom was such a firm believer in ridding ourselves of what’s called “memory clutter,” that if the fingerpaintings that I brought home from Kindergarten were anything less than Renoir quality, out they went. I was OK with that, but if tomorrow’s homework was mistaken for yesterday’s, I was doing it all over again sometime between dinner and bedtime. Ouch.

I learned quickly that bare surfaces, wide-open basements, and garages with cars in them were good. I also learned that if I wanted to spend my evenings watching the Carol Burnett Show instead of rummaging through the garbage for the homework I had left laying around, I had better keep my poop grouped, to re-word a certain, less G-rated phrase.

On the flip side, my dad and I were never allowed to help around the house, for fear that we would mess everything up. Mom was afraid that we would do everything wrong, and so she did it all. The shame in all that was not that I ended up watching too many old movies instead of doing chores, but that I grew up convinced that adulthood was going to gag me with a spoon, so to Valley-speak. I would have to do my own housework just right, all the time, or the sky would fall. What a conundrum.

So imagine my delight upon discovering Marla Cilley, or as she’s known among the Internets, FlyLady. Marla has spent a good chunk of her life learning to declutter her life and take control of her family, home, and self care routines, and now she teaches others. One of FlyLady’s tenets is that any effort towards making your home a nicer place is a good one, and that we don’t have to do it all right now; in fact, all we have to do is a little, each day. “Don’t worry about catching up,” she writes. “Just jump in where we are.”

To take a page out of Zwaggle history, Marla joined Zwaggle on BlogTalk Radio to discuss the magic that happens when we pass along our things as we declutter, whatever those things may be. And that’s what hooked me; if I’ve been lucky enough to receive something useful, someone else can ride that lucky streak too, all by way of Zwaggle. (I wonder if donating my Zoints to charity counts double.)

We’re all in this together, and life may be short, but the life cycle of our things can go on and on. We can bless others with the things we part with, and there’s no way to get it wrong, which I think is another way of saying that Zwaggle is for people who love to be right. No wonder I’m a fan.

What the younger generation has been saying all this time is really true: It’s all good. Don’t worry, though. Now that I’m 400 years old, I’m not going to start uttering youthful catch phrases out loud. (In fact, the image I have in my mind of my dad attempting the sentence, “That freaks me out!” still gives me hives.) As long as we keep at circulating our own fortune and goodness, progress is inevitable, and so on and so on.