Cleaning Out

I had dinner with several long-time friends this evening, walked when I got home, and then sat to write, and my mind was a clutter of random thoughts, shooting off in a dozen different directions. I meditated. More clutter. In my drafts folder for the blog, I found a piece that I thought I'd posted over a month ago.  It was somewhat out of date, but, probably not by accident, it is also something that has been on my mind lately.  Cleaning out.

In late December, I cleaned out all the unsolicited cosmetics with which various companies have gifted me. It freed up significant space in my medicine cabinet and left me even freer psychically. Then, I took on my bag bin.  In the 1980s when almost no one except Kay was reusing bags, I was taking the same paper grocery bags back to the store week-in, week-out. At one point, I began dating them to see how long they would last.  One lasted a whole year--52 weeks.  So you can imagine how delighted I was at the advent of bags which were actually designed for reuse.

But then everyone and his/her cousin discovered the reusable bags were perfect little billboards. Every conference or show gives them away. My public radio station gives them away.  When I looked at apartments a few years ago, they gave them away.  Even my local hardware store gave them away. When DC passed a bill to charge for paper or plastic, the stores gave them away.  All those bags and only four or five that I used regularly.  Most of the others were gone with the start of the year.

The second week of January I went into a sorting frenzy with books.  I donated about six boxes to the library in my building.  They don't take textbooks, so I have another box in the corner of my living room still looking for a home. Those seven boxes were the books at which I knew I would never look again.  I fussed as I contemplated at least 10 boxes moved out of my offices or my storage bin await sorting. I was able to get rid of one box, but there are nine more.

The only pleasing I needed to do was my heart, and I had struggled.  What would be part of my future? What would not?  Do I throw away hundreds of flyers for professional speaking which were really great designs, but were printed at just the time the dot.com bust and 9/11 killed the keynote conference-speaking circuit I'd been on?  Of course, I do.  That 16-year-old photo is almost unrecognizable.  How do I let the Universe know I am open to professional speaking...just not the badly dated flyer, I had wondered, wanting to be careful not to send the wrong message.

Then something funny happened.  I got distracted. My class and refugee resettlement activities picked up the pace, and I was able to back-burner the sorting.  I did, however, leave several of the boxes right in the middle of my closest so that I cannot easily get to more than a few clothes without high-stepping over them. I didn't want to forget about the sorting. That's how I've been dressing since the end of the year.

A week or so ago I began to be impatient. Not with the climbing over the boxes, although that has been an annoyance.  I got frustrated at the time my class was taking because now I knew exactly what to get rid of and didn't have time to do it. Almost all of it.  As sparks within me have been ignited for these new directions, the mind-numbing boredom with my old work has become clear to me.  While I'd like to think I have the capability to do whatever I need to do to support myself, my heart is shouting...not whispering, but shouting..."NOT THAT!"  There was a time when I was energized by the work, but that is definitely the past.  Enough already.  I am ready to move on.

I am at the point in any class during which final projects and exams are occurring, so I must stay at it. While there is part of me that would like to just chuck it all, I suspect that there are things in each box that I do want to keep, but not much. Yet, having taken time to reconnect with my heart, I am certain that the decision-making will be easy.

All that brings me back to my intention to listen to what I know in my heart--the very purpose of this blog. In my heart I know that my future lies in what brings me to life, and what I did for 25 years no longer does that.  To hang on to even one shred that isn't aligned with my future would again be a breach of my integrity.  I am just unwilling to go there, and I have to believe that if the Universe has given me this spark, it will make sure I can support myself in my new directions.

Rule No. 1: I don't have to keep gifts

December 21 has come and gone. Somewhere about the 15th I knew that I wasn't going to have time to go through every single thing in my house to assess what is part of the future during the busyness of the holidays.  In lieu of actually doing the manual sort, I made clear commitments to my intentions: what would and would not be part of my future.  Among the commitments I made was to include beliefs, attitudes, and habits.

My day start with an email exchange with an old friend about refusing gifts to avoid the commercialization of Christmas.  I started about 25 years ago by asking friends to give to charity in lieu of giving me gifts.  That didn't fly at all.  Now two and a half decades later, I continue to tell people that I don't need or want "stuff." I would be delighted, I tell them, with the gift of time: a walk, a cup of coffee, cooking together, or a movie and popcorn on the couch after the holidays have passed...or anything else that they'd like to do.  I don't see nearly enough of my friends: spending time with them would be a gift I'd really like to receive...and it doesn't clutter my tiny apartment.

The paper today shared a practice of giving something to charity for everything that we receive.  The example was that if you got a new pair of shoes, you had to give a pair away.  Or, if a child got two toys, he/she had to give two toys away.  If I do keep gifts, I think I will discipline myself to give away in replacement.

Perhaps it is because I've had the accumulation of gifts on my mind that this evening I had an aha! moment when I opened my medicine cabinet which is bulging at the seams.  I surveyed all the stuff in it and realized that I hadn't bought most of it.  Often when I buy cosmetics, I am gifted with a package of generous-sized samples of fairly expensive products.  Some of them I do use, and I am grateful for travel-sized versions of products that I usually purchase for my travel bag.  However, most of the products are not ones I will use.

As I assessed the contents of my cabinet this evening, I started pulling off all the stuff that I know I won't use, didn't want in the first place, and don't want.  Just because someone gives me something doesn't mean I have to keep it.  I haven't taken the time to do so on this eve of Christmas Eve to go through other cabinets and drawers, but I am certain that just following the rule that I don't have to keep gifts will liberate me from a heap of stuff.

Now, I realize that it will be much easier to throw away gifts from Estee Lauder or Clinique than gifts that were given to me by friends, but it isn't like I don't tell them every year that I don't want stuff.  I already spotted homemade food gifts that don't particularly appeal to me.  They will be a good place to start cleaning.

What joy this discovery has made me!  Perhaps this is the gift that I really wanted for Christmas this year: spiritual housecleaning -- freedom to be relieved of the burden of unwanted stuff.

Housecleaning

I have just finished a fast-paced course on the Psychology of Happiness.  There was a lot of writing and even more reading, as well as participation in online class forums.  While I have definitely just done a major sigh of relief, I will miss some of the fruitful conversations (and consequent personal insights) that I've had with my classmates.   Not much of content was new to me but the self-discoveries along the way were invaluable.

There was a twice a year ritual that I experienced while growing up in the Midwest:  housecleaning. We cleaned more than twice a year, but the fall and spring housecleaning was different.  Literally everything in the house was turned over and cleaned.  Windows were washed. Drawers were emptied, sorted to dispose of things that had outlived their usefulness or size, and reordered.  More than just cleaning, the ritual was cleaning out.

For a few years in my adulthood, I continued the ritual, but gradually it went from twice a year to once a year.  First the windows were dropped off.  Then the cleaning out the drawers fell away. Gradually, the ritual just disappeared. Even on my way-too-frequent moves, I seemed not to find the time or priority to clean out.

As my class has been drawing to an end, I've felt myself itching to clean out.  That may at least be in part due to the fact that stacks of reading materials and outlines for essays have overtaken my small desk.  A second computer that is still not been completely replaced by the new one, and related technology items, add to the disarray as does an inappropriate gift I received a few months ago and haven't quite known what to do with.  I've wished I could just push it all into a waste bin and make it go away, but I know things of value lurk in the piles. I think that has just been symbolic of what has been going on inside of me as this class is drawing to a close.

I've been feeling the need to psychologically and spiritual clean out as well.  After 14 years of serious financial struggle since the failure of my business, I am finally to a place where I can let my shoulders drop a bit.  After five years of the most dysfunctional work environment that I've ever witnessed in 25 years of consulting with organizations, three layers of management above me have either been removed or quit in the last months.  While we are now at about half-staff, and a crushing workload faces me daily as far as I can see, I can find potential that new leadership may bring.  Hope is on the horizon.

All that leads me to have discovered in these three weeks that I've been in serious fight-or-flight mode for years.  For so long, that it has become habitual.  While the content of the class has not been anything I didn't know or even anything that I didn't practice for years, it has helped me re-member who I am. I say re-member because it feels like part of myself was put on a shelf and forgotten.  If this class hasn't helped me pull it off the shelf and reintegrate it completely, at the very least I have it in my hands--all of me in my hands.

The cleaning out that I really feel the need for right now is getting rid of all the habits and behaviors that came with the fight-or-flight so that I literally have room to breathe again.  And, the funny thing is that I also think I want to actually clean out, not just metaphorically.

The myth of Psyche demonstrates that the role of women is to sort, pick out what is useful and what has outlived it usefulness.  I think my sorting muscles have atrophied, and physically cleaning my desk, files, closet, and pantry will help me get them in shape for the spiritual sorting I am beginning. While I might like to treat my psyche like my desk and make all the clutter just go away, I know that good stuff is buried in there that I don't want to lose. So, sort I will.