Sometimes I close my eyes and see visions of a conveyor belt bringing things into my house. It is so EASY for things to make their way in. There is a constant stream of clothes, gifts, hand-me-downs, paperwork, school handouts, mail, stuff, that all have a green light into my house and life. (Yes, I’m fortunate, grateful and happy about it too but not focusing on that here.) But the stream heading out of the house is not as constant. Older stuff, unused stuff, outgrown stuff accumulates in the corners and on the shelves. It is as though sending stuff out of the house and back into the world is going against the current and takes a lot of effort.
Part of the effort is the decision making. How much stuff do we actually need, how much do we want and how much are we just too indecisive about that it just lands someplace? These questions sound rhetorical, but they really shouldn’t be.
I remember walking 500 miles across the North of Spain, doing the Camino de Santiago, when I was 17 years old and I carried what I needed on my back. I was happy. Anything that didn’t serve a vital purpose was let go, as it wasn’t worth its weight, literally. Now, many years later, with a family and house, it is quite different, but I would like to be closer to that pilgrimage mentality than I am. There are a lot of benefits to having less and the headlines are often about this. In fact, I enjoyed the recent article published by the New York Times entitled “The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter” . Even the title is fantastic. Clutter is heavy, it adds weight to our lives and slowness, distraction and stress. Things that drag us down. We cannot readily find what we want. It’s like playing Where’s Waldo to find matching socks.
So how do we choose what we hold on to? I love Marie Kondo’s method, the author of ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up’. She recommends holding the object and asking ourselves, ‘does this object spark joy?’. I love it because it a subjective question, with no rules and yet, sparking joy isn’t easily accomplished; a certain threshold must be met in order to spark joy. Tons of objects will not reach that threshold. I don’t doubt that each of the items in my pack during that 500 miles pilgrimage sparked joy for me.
This season I’m going to try to clear our some spaces in my life and house, so I have wiggle room. Room to move and create, to rest and be inspired. Room to feel the lightness.
Stay tuned to see how this mentality might spill out into other areas in life….