Our clutter isn’t relegated only to material things.
Joshua Fields Millburn
We clutter our lives with destructive relationships, careers, obligations, rituals, busyness, minutiae, news, media, politics, gossip, drama, rumours.
We clutter our attention with glowing screens.
We clutter our creativity with distractions.
We clutter our free time with trivialities.
We clutter our desires with attachments.
Our lives are brimming with existential clutter, emotional clutter, mental clutter, spiritual clutter.
So much so that it’s hard to distinguish what is clutter—and what is not.
We are stressed out, overwhelmed, and anxious because we’ve filled our lives with disorder, chaos.
Though there is a solution.
Look at an object, a commitment, a habit.
Does it bring tranquillity or increase your well-being?
If not, let it go!
Not an easy fix,
but a simple one.
I’ve been decluttering again.
In my never-ending battle to get rid of unneeded stuff, and find places for the things that are needed (half the battle sometimes), I’ve taken a different tack and started sorting through different parts of my life and questioning what is truly important to me.
It’s not been easy. The last few months, pandemic aside, have been very trying for me and my family yet, in a way, they’ve been hugely instructive as well, especially as I now have a little distance from which to view things.
Obviously, the sudden death of my father in August is the largest disruption, but since then my Mum has had issues with an abscess causing her to need a short stay in hospital and more recently she had not one but two falls, cracking vertebrae the first time, and her pelvis the second; My Mum is a stroke survivor of 9 years with limited use of her left side so that makes things a little trickier still. I spent a couple of weeks living with her to get her through the worst of it. And still, more recent news includes the death of a close friends mother, the list goes on…
This is all to say that, as always, life continues to throw curveballs because clearly a global pandemic that is killing people and destroying livelihoods – not to mention a Prime Minister that is killing people and destroying livelihoods (but none those of his chums obv) – is apparently not enough to deal with.
But enough with the woe is me.
I’m lucky, very very lucky in comparison to many.
I’ve been able to work through the pandemic and my boss has been supportive of my need for sudden time off and the resulting skewed working hours here and there, something that would’ve been impossible to manage if I was still office-based.
Throughout all of this my amazing partner has been an absolute rock, I don’t think I could have gotten through all of this the way I have without her and it’s helped me learn a lot about our relationship, and myself. My friends too have reached out and been there whenever I asked, and all in all, I feel very loved and supported. I hope I’ve been able to offer a shred of that back to them but, I fear as always, I’ve not quite been there enough.
I look at my acquaintances, more recent friends made in the past few years, and can see that I’ve fallen out of touch. It’s natural, I think, to shrink your world when things get hard so I’m looking forward to a time when it can start to grow again, to embrace those people once more, figuratively and literally.
In a way, this minimised life has forced me to look at how I live more than anything, the habits I have, the things I do and don’t do. As I’ve mentioned here I’m now someone who meditates almost every day, I stretch almost every morning, and even though we are heading to peak food consumption day, I’m still being (mostly) mindful of what I put in my body.
Christmas is another good time to focus on why we have so many things. I look at where I’m sitting now and can see things I don’t need and/or don’t use, and I’m glad that my family is adopting a no presents for adults rule (small mindings aside). We do the same, Becca and I, and it’s twice the fun to spot something small that I know she’ll love.
Next year will bring more challenges no doubt, Brexit will loom large through January and February as we adjust to whatever that brings (does anyone really know?), and as the vaccination and COVID variants continue to battle perhaps we need to look to the summer for more respite, and the chance to reconnect.
However I’m convinced there will be good news next year, one way or another, and as an aide to that part of my recent decluttering thoughts have been about the news I consume, both in terms of volume and source. I’m still reading and keeping up but find myself spending far less time getting lost in the discussions and what-if-ery that seems to be more and more prevalent.
Ultimately things will play out as they will so let’s focus on what is here and now, right in front of us. This is the now we can be a part of, and now, more than ever, I feel the need to push all of the other noise away, taking a broom to the clutter that feeds in via social media, news website, radio announcements and newspaper headlines.
It feels good to be clearing out a little, even if it’s only really a mental adjustment, a bit of stock-taking here and there to remind myself of the things I’m keeping in my life as much as the things I’m pushing away. Switching the focus away from all that clutter to only the things I’m keeping, the things I really need, make it all so much easier.
