Today I cleaned out my cupboards. Not a major event in life for most of us, no doubt, but for me, cleaning things out of my closet and cupboards is always a purging of sorts. There is something about sorting items out that gives a sense of order to disorder, cleanness of lines to unprocessable clutter, and harmony to what is disharmonious. Springcleaning doesn’t have to happen in spring … it only needs a mind overfilled with stuff to warrant going into auto overdrive!
Usually, this happens about three times annually. That’s pretty intense on average. This past year and a half though, I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern … springcleaning seems to be happening every few months … How it begins is innocuous enough. I think of clutter. I see clutter. I feel clutter. I clean.
But clutter is not just outer clutter.
One’s interior weather is very much linked indeed to exterior weather … the inner wears the outer. So I know when I think of clutter that it isn’t just a matter of clutter in the closet that’s bugging me, but clutter on the inside too. I am a rather minimalist person by nature … I like neatness in essential things. I prefer straight rows to crooked ones, sharp and clean lines to blurry ones, so I don’t generally get too thrilled when life’s issues start to spill over their set boundaries. The things we carry in our heads, like the things we stuff in our cupboards, need cleaning and organising from time to time too, or they will overwhelm us like some overstuffed landfill. I think that is why many people choose to write journals … it’s a form of unloading and debriefing from what is just too heavy and burdensome … too weighty for the closet of the mind to handle. For me, though, journalling is so much like writing which is so much like the work I do that the only way I can truly unload is by … springcleaning …
As with things and stuff, the only way to really clean is to be really ruthless, to tell yourself that this or that has to go because it is no longer useful to keep. Thoughts and dreams that perhaps have outlived their ”Use By” date need to go, much as food that has expired needs to thrown away. It’s only such ruthlessness with yourself that any kind of true cutting off and cleansing can happen. When clutter, whether objects or emotions, memories or thoughts, are removed, then and only then can you see clearly where you are, where you’re going, and what you got out of. The clarity that looks back at you like white space may seem empty at first, but you will come to appreciate the solidity of the background structures that have supported you, and will continue to support you even when your clutter is no longer there. That architecture of the soul provides you with your context for moving forward in new ways, meaningful ways.
Hampered as we are by our many belongings and many emotional burdens, springcleaning is not an easy task. For many, it is something to be avoided until the unavoidable confronts us with its remorseless inevitability. But the unloading that springcleaning of the home and soul brings also brings closure too, closure to uncertainties, closure to events, closure to the sentiments attached to objects, thoughts, feelings. It is only then that you feel free enough, and light enough, to get up and move.
I know what has been cluttering me up on the inside, as well as I know what has been cluttering my cupboards in my exterior world. Today, I cleaned out quite a significant amount of–things, not rubbish, but just things stuffing my conscience deep inside myself so that I could barely hear or feel it. I don’t think I will enjoy the stark, clean lines of all that space I have now made for myself, whether inside or outside. But that is only for a while. Only for a time will it seem too white and too light. But when I look again at the architectural simplicity of life arching overhead, I will be reminded that it is the unharnessed and unhampered soul that will travel the furthest and the fastest.
