Decluttering

Purging mind, purging house, purging purse. I find that physical clutter adds garbage to the mind, and mind clutter makes the physical clutter look bigger. Instead of getting rid of stuff, we pile up more stuff, then we need to manage that stuff, that adds to other stuff that's already in our head, and it gets to the point where it has to spill - but no room is available. So it spills inside, it gets suppressed, and we pile more on top, and more, and more, then - boom! - there is no exit. We're blocked. We don't know how to get out. Not a single thread leads to the door - there is no visible door left. And we panic. We don't know where to start to dig ourselves out. What do we do? We decide thats how everybody lives - we hear muffled sounds all around - from buried people - and we join the club. Everybody runs around with baggage - why get rid of it? It feels warm and comforting after a while, and we get used to our own garbage so that it doesn't bother us anymore. But it does. It sits in the back of our mind, and it nags to be cleaned, to be rid of. Emotional clutter - to be dealt with. Memory clutter - to be processed. Toxic clutter - to be flushed out of our bodies. Boxes and piles of stuff that accumulate in the dark corners of our house - to be taken away and redistributed or recycled or thrown away completely.

I thought - I've got all my "head" stuff safely removed with years of therapy and journaling and writing and recovering. Bullshit. I am still dealing with layer upon layer of stuff - only I don't want to admit to it. It surfaces here and there, in disturbing dreams that come less and less, in sudden mood swings - which occur less often, in strong emotional reactions to simple words or situations that somehow become the trigger for the past - but not as much as it used to. And all of that gets amplified with the physical "stuff" that I have to do - I used to hide behind it, I used to be very busy. Now it's scary because I see it for what it is - simple stuff that helps me enjoy life, not the other way around. All of it lost its value to me - the way it used to be in the past. But I procrastinate to take care of it and get rid of it. I can't admit that by getting rid of it completely - I will also free up space in my head - so that instead of crossing things off of a to-do list, I can do drawing, mindless doodling on a piece of paper to capture nothing in particular; I can do painting, dipping a brush into paint and slapping it onto a canvas, to maybe make a shape of a flower or a sun or sky; I can step into a puddle after the rain and watch my feet get wet, wondering how long it will take for the water to sip all the way in, and then walk on the street, listening to the funny sounds my feet make; I can take time to twist my hair around my finger and think about nothing, and not feel guilty about it.

It's scary to let go. All things mean something to us. Everything has been somehow acquired in the past, everything bears a hand print of us touching it for the first time, cherishing it, or despising it, or being ignorant of it. Every thing has an emotion attached to it. If we let go, do we become less? Are we married to our physical stuff, or does the amount of stuff we harbor mirrors the amount of chaos that fills up our heads? I don't know. I do know that letting go is both terrifying and exhilarating. Once I get rid of it all, I feel empty and breezy - like a chunk of fog is gone from my intellectual visor, and I can go faster now, I can see clearer the road ahead of me, I feel lighter now that nothing is pressing on my shoulders, nothing pulls at my subconscious - begging to be done. The trick is - to not listen. To learn to cut it all off at a certain point. Because no matter how hard I try, no matter how explicit I am about not leaving a trace of garbage - new stuff comes my way. There will always be stuff to do - it's up to me to tell myself when to stop. When to close the door and be empty - until I'm ready to get back and deal with whatever it is I have to deal with. Until then - decluttering time rules. And it feels oh so good. 

Photo by Nicki Varkevisser.