Having worked with several people to create space, clear out
clutter and bring a sense of order to material chaos, I've observed an
interesting phenomena. Major de-cluttering seems to always lead to major
life changes. It sounds weird that letting go of your things could bring
about changes like a new job or a new home. But I've seen it over and
over again and had other people tell me of the phenomena, as well.
In fact I'm so certain of its effect, that I regularly recommend
"decluttering for change" to clients and friends. Usually they
look at me first with a roll of the eyes and then a look of abject horror
at the idea of getting rid of their possessions. But I'm not talking
about shedding all of our belongings. Just around 15%-25%. Now
before you shake your head no, I'd like to point out that most of us own things
that we haven't looked at or even seen in over a year. It's true.
Clothes we haven't worn, books we haven't read, CDs we haven't listened to,
dishes we haven't used, etc.
We're keeping it all for a variety of reasons. "Just
in case I need it one day" is a major one. "It has sentimental
value" is another. "I'm going to get to that one day" is a
third. "I had no idea I even had this" is a fourth! We've
got junk rooms, closets, basements, garages and storage units filled to
capacity with all kinds of items. Waiting for a someday that never seems
to arrive.
So let's consider what happens if we get rid of all the myriad
"its" that float throughout our lives and around our homes…
First let's engage in a visualization exercise I like to have
clients play around with. Close your eyes and imagine that we each have
gold threads of energy coming out of the tops of our heads and these threads
connect to EVERY item we have in our possession. Every item! Each
individual piece of silverware, each picture in the photo album, each photo
album, CD, DVD, hammer, nail, sock, book, magazine, sweater, car, guitar pick
and even every computer file. It's one energy thread per item.
We keep something in our life by maintaining an emotional
connection with it. In our visualization, the emotional connection is
represented by the gold thread of energy. Like satellites around a
planet, we bring items into our lives and then keep them revolving around us —
until we decide we no longer want them and then we discard them — one less
satellite floating about us. For example, when the mayonnaise jar is
empty most people simply throw the jar away or recycle it. (Hoarders are
an exception.) There is no debate on whether the jar should be saved or
where to store it. This is because there is no emotional connection to
the mayonnaise jar. It's served its purpose, we move on and let it go.
But consider a favorite sweater that you keep although you never
wear it. Or the pile of books you are "going to read
someday." Or the various artistic projects and their prerequisite
clutter that are splayed across the dining room table. We keep these
things in our lives because we have an emotional connection to them.
Whether the connection is past, present or future or because we have invested
time, money or energy into the item is inconsequential. It's an emotional
attachment and we keep the item in our life. But there is a price we pay
for maintaining all these items that float through our lives.
So now envision wherever we go we energetically carry all that
stuff with us. We drag it behind ourselves via the connecting gold thread
of emotional energy. How much stuff are we dragging? It's quite a
bit actually. And some people are dragging much more than others!
Is it any wonder we have a hard time creating change when we are bogged down
with material clutter from twenty years ago (which, by the way, represents
emotional attachments from the past twenty years)? And I haven't even
mentioned people, pets, places, memories or emotional experiences that we also
keep connected to us! We're all dragging quite a bit behind us. It's
a wonder we can make the bus to work!
But what if we eliminate a quarter of our stuff? How much
lighter will we feel? Will we even miss any of these things we discard or
giveaway? Through experience, the answer is surprisingly: not
really. (Occasionally we'll look for something and think "Now why
did I get rid of the stapler!?!" But even if that happens, we tend
to shrug our shoulders and then make do with the situation.)
So when we embark on a major declutter initiative, what we are
actually engaging in is a complete re-evaluation of our lives. We're
letting go, paring down, purging, prioritizing, re-evaluating, discovering,
risk-taking and developing a new level of trust in ourselves and the
cosmos. It's this part of the declutter process that creates the
change. The act of throwing things away is simply the physical
manifestation of our emotional overhaul. And it's this
intellectual/emotional tug-of-war that we engage in as we are doing the purging
that is so exhausting about decluttering.
So a major spring cleaning actually becomes an extensive tour of
our entire lives — past, present and future. If we decide to throw away
Aunt Emma's toaster oven, we are literally snipping the emotional connection we
have with the toaster cover, and consequently with Aunt Emma. There's
guilt, there's dread, for some people it may feel like we're putting lovely
Aunt Emma in a life raft and shoving her off alone into the open sea.
"Bye, bye Aunt Emma! Nice knowing ya! Good luck!"
And poor Aunt Emma reproachfully stares at us and our shallow betrayal as
sharks circle around her leaky life raft…
We've mistakenly melded together Aunt Emma and her once useful
toaster. Discarding the toaster oven doesn't mean we love Aunt Emma any
less. It just means that Aunt Emma is taking a new role in our lives —
one that doesn't involve toast. It's not a lesser or greater role, just a
different toast-free one. If we examine the situation closely, we will
ultimately realize that our emotional connection and sense of closeness is to
Aunt Emma — not her old toaster oven with the missing thermostat knob.
And we may realize that we have a wonderful letter from Aunt Emma which we
enjoy much more than her second-hand appliance. The toaster oven served
us well and Aunt Emma is still a bell weather in our lives. So we keep
the letter and get rid of the toaster oven (which incidentally we haven't used
in eleven months because we're no longer having toast for breakfast anymore).
In the end, it's this meander through our inner emotional
landscape that fills us with dread about opening up a box in the attic and
going through it. Intuitively we realize we will need to make decisions
about ourselves, our past, our present, our future and our old emotional
baggage. Think about it, we're not emotionally drained after cleaning out
the fridge and tossing the spoiled food. There's no emotionality to
it. There's mold in that jar, so we chuck it into the trash pail and get
on with our day. But we'll sit and stare at Aunt Emma's toaster oven for
a good forty to sixty minutes being filled with remorse for even considering
tossing it into the trash can.
In the case of unread books, we're saying "I'm letting go
of this goal. I haven't read these in five years and I am probably not
going to read them in the next six months. The intention was good, but I
simply don't have the time, inclination or both." And that can be a
disconcerting experience because it puts us face-to-face with our personal
limitations and a sense of failure ("Surely I've had the time in the past
five years to read these ten book! ?! It's only two books a year! Could I
really not have read them!?! How is that possible?")
Dishes, appliances, linens all tend to fall into the "Well,
I might need these if someone stops by." which means we're decorating and
living our lives for the occasional social experience — not for
ourselves. If twenty-five people stop by and we don't have enough wine
glasses…we'll probably figure something else out. Or we'll hand out
straws and pass the bottle around. We'll make due and it will be
fine. But then how often do twenty-five people suddenly stop by because
they were in the neighborhood?
And all those myriad projects — the artistic endeavors, the
someday I'll eBay items, the do-it-yourself ideas — letting go of them is
saying "That hoped for vision of me as an upholsterer is never going to
happen. And that wonderful future of me sitting in these wonderful chairs
in my wonderful home is not a reality that is going to exist this lifetime."
And that can be saddening because our view of the future is seemingly
narrowed. One less dream of Olympic glory, one less hope of artistic
excellence and one less goal of being a refinisher of Arts and Crafts furniture
comes to reality.
And on the other side of the clutter purge is…a wonderful sense
of freedom. The more we let go, the more external and internal space we
open up for new stuff to grow in our lives. Ultimately, all of us only
have so much emotional, psychological and physical space. But clutter is
more than a three dimensional phenomena — it's not just physical and spatial,
its emotional, symbolic, energetic and metaphysical too. Thus the letting
go forces us to trust that the unknown will be fine. We can't let go of
thirty of our forty wine glasses unless we trust in our ability to resolve ever
needing more than ten wine glasses at a time. Consequently, each time we
let go, decluttering becomes an exercise in deepening our confidence in ourself
and the cosmos.
Each time we choose to discard an item, we are taking a symbolic
pair of scissors and cutting the energetic connection we have with the
item. To do that, we have to make some emotional choices in our life and
examine who we were in the past, what we are about today, who we are not going
to be tomorrow and who we want to be next week. And the more we pare
down, the closer we get to living in the present moment and being comfortable
in the current reality. Because the more we purge, the less we attach to
the past and the less we attach to the future. We're making the que sera
sear decision to live in the present moment. The past is over and can't
be changed, the future is not ours to see and will take care of itself…and we
trust ourselves to thrive without a backup supply of fifteen year old sweaters,
cookbooks we've never opened or dinnerware for sixty-two.
And
it's this that makes us feel so energetically and physically lighter at the end
of our decluttering journey. We hardly even realized it, but we're living
more in the moment, having let go of a bunch of stuff that represents old
dreams, unfinished endeavors, and guilty twinges over good intentions gone
unfulfilled. And that intuitive sense that there is physical lightness
associated with material and emotional space is what keeps us pondering
"next week I'm going to tackle that junk room!"