Clutter – by Liimu

Clutter.

Just the word makes my mind start racing with images of closets full of clothes that should be donated to Good Will or moved to the attic to make way for spring and summer fashions. With the temperature pushing 90 more days than not, I can no longer pretend that Summer isn’t here yet, regardless of whether the township pool has opened or not.

A good friend of mine told me she had just begun taking a series of workshops on decluttering and what she was learning was the way that decluttering our homes or workspaces can also help us to uncover areas in our lives – our emotional, spiritual, financial lives – that also need clearing. I have found this week that the reverse is also true. That when I leave the clutter in my life alone, everything else seems to be jammed up (at least I hope that’s why).

For the past couple of days, my sister and I have been supporting each other in waiting for our respective calls from clients or (we hope) future employers. I’d text her that I couldn’t wait and she’d text back that I needed to wait until we could at least talk on the phone about it. By the time we’d talk on the phone, she’d be the one needing to be reminded that we had agreed to wait to call until Thursday. Talk about clutter – the chatter in my head about what if?, and why not? was suffocating. To make a long story short, when we finally talked to our contacts, we essentially learned nothing. The people weren’t getting back to us, simply because they were swamped.

Swamped? Or cluttered, I wondered. Maybe, I thought, the best thing I can do to help clear out the energy of my Universe (and hopefully that of these people) is to clear out the energy of my own home. And as I began today to sort through my daughters’ drawers – making foot high piles of long-sleeved shirts and footie pajamas, I actually began to feel myself clearing. The unnecessary anxiety I had been feeling like an albatross around my neck was actually loosening. By the end of the day, I had not only transferred all the spring/summer to their drawers (and mine) and all the fall/winter back up to the attic, but I had put all the dusty bogeymen about financial fear and scary scenarios up there with them.

Now if only I can keep from dragging them back out! My head is no more free of clutter forever than the playroom downstairs is free of unused toys and games missing pieces. Eventually I will get down there to clean it out and for a moment, it will be pristine and organized, just like for right now, everything about my current job situation makes perfect sense. But just as next week there will likely be a colorful assortment of pens with no caps littering the playroom floor, the old anxieties are bound to creep back in and try to make their case for why I should obsess about them.

Let’s hope I can keep both my house and my head clutter-free!