- What your clutter wants to tell you – The usual approach to decluttering Do you know this situation: Stacks of paper have miraculously accumulated so one day you decide enough is enough. With a major approach you courageously step up and face these heaps of paper.
You work through them, tile, sort, cut, paste, throw away.
If you are a bit like me, you do a great job at this, but at the end you come up with three to five boxes. They are named something like:
“Memorabilia”
“Just in Case”
“Yet undecided, where this has to go”
You are proud you finished your job and these three boxes look very neat and clean and your promise to yourself, that some day you will take care of these items.
Is there anything familiar with this scenario?
It has not to be paper, it might be books, one shelf labelled “Gifts from friends, times to remember” another “If one day … (continue with … I own a farm, … I will drive through Greece, … I might be interested in apiculture, …). Your third shelf holds the theme “I might need this at my job, just in case I had to do some programming, I once loved to program, this yearn might return).
Or it might be clothes: Here you might have three piles:
I wore this shirt when …
If I loose these extra 15 pounds
I will wear this if I start that exercise regimen.
Your boxes, shelves, piles might be named different but you get the picture.
Now you have come to the end with your decluttering. You have cleared your space, some pieces are left for you to take care of later and you think you are finished.
The usual long-term outcome of decluttering But something will happen soon:
No matter how hard you try, paper, books, clothes or whatever is your clutter speciality will start to accumulate again.
Till the day, when you decide to cope with it again.
You begin to perceive clutter as your enemy, an enemy you have to fight back.
And you know what? Your clutter defends itself. When you are very strong and it is almost gone, it finds other ways to creep back into your life. It starts to accumulate in another room, in the basement or it changes from paper to books or clothes or vice versa.
At one point you want to give up. You might even feel there is something wrong with you. Why does this clutter haunt you and why does it resist your efforts?
Clutter is your friend This is because clutter is your friend. It wants to tell you something.
Your soul whispers to you and tells you about your dreams, your desires, your purpose. If you don’t hear it and act on it, it starts to manifest in different ways. Ways that are possible at the moment. It wants to become visible, sometimes using small, even inexpensive items.
What is one piece of paper? Not yet clutter. No, instead it is an article about somebody or something you are interested in. Perhaps somebody travelling ancient cultures. You would love to take these travels but don’t find the time, the money or the courage to do so. Perhaps you even forgot about this desire. But your soul hasn’t forgotten. So whenever you come upon a story like this or correlating pictures, you have to keep them. And this moment is actually the beginning of a pile ofpaperandclutter.Perhaps you don’t look close at it, because that might bring up your unfulfilled desire and this would be painful and hurting. To camouflage this deep desire even more you put it into a pile of paper with newspapers, bills and other pieces. What a sophisticated way to have a piece of your dream around you, yet to never have to admit to.
Only when you start one of your attacks against your paper piles you will look at these pieces of paper again, sigh deeply with a faint smile and for a second you think and feel: “I would love to travel, too.”
Your clutter reminds you: books speak to you of your dream job, while you stay where you are, or about a favorite hobby you never try. Your clothes talk about the “real” you, that perhaps at the moment is hiding behind a curtain of superfluous pounds.
So if you really want to get a grip on your clutter, resist the urge to fight it. Instead see it as the friend your soul invited for you, to sing the gentle song of your dreams and desires to you.
