useless clutter: what’s really lurking in that junk drawer?

I need help.
I loose things, I loose things daily.
Big things little things:, phone, car keys, car, money, friends.
I'm not kidding, I need advice.
Help handy girl.
confused.

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dear confused,
in the 1800’s, some people lived in a frenzied world of thrown-up, mass-produced, overly-decorated objects. oh, the horrorvacue of it all, such fear of empty spaces. you see, with the industrial revolution came all kinds of new materials and new technologies and new processes for making things.

with a population explosion of middle class humans who wanted to have stuff, lots of objects of material culture were made and bought and sold and traded and stolen and consumed by many people and it was all about making money, and having, at the very least, the appearance of wealth.

and then this guy, william morris, was like, this sucks man, and so he fathered the arts and crafts movement, a design reform movement in england that believed in handcrafting, among other things, like education, or how decoration must never be used to cover up shoddy work. william said, “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”, ('the beauty of life', 1880). i wonder, can the same be said for the mind?

we have yard sales to let go of physical clutter. there is always crap that doesn’t sell, so we give it away or leave it out for people to pick through until garbage day. working through our physical space forces us to deal with those pesky mental and emotional attachments we have to stuff, and makes us look at our shit.

every object we own and every thought we possess, comes from somewhere and defines who we are. do we really want to characterize ourselves as useless crap that nobody wants, that sits in the rain until some stinky old honking truck comes by and takes it to the dump?

in our modern world, there are way too many useless objects. capitalism and habitual consumerism cross through all of the genders, races and classes. objects of distraction take us away from obtaining what we really need, or finding what we have lost. forgetfulness happens when our minds go wading off through the streams of useless clutter.

if a desk of a hundred papers had ninety nine useless ones, how much time would we spend looking for the only one we need? committing to letting go of useless clutter is a lifestyle change that takes courage and effort, and it opens us up to growing and changing and welcoming the new.

so what about our thoughts? how many suitcases could we fill up with useless, crappy thoughts, and why can’t our psychological and emotional baggage go missing the next time we’re at the airport? the emotional bomb squad would have a field day sorting through some of our unattended suspicious packages.

when we lose something, it could mean that we really aren’t meant to have it, that we need to slow down or that we are too distracted by physical, emotional and psychological clutter to focus. drugs, alcohol, diet and brain things can affect our memory, but if these don’t apply, then distraction is likely the culprit.

~

disclaimer: i do not by any means discount the possibility of the odd guardian angel throwing a delay our way in order to help us avoid a catastrophe.

~
to really let go of the negative and distracting things and thoughts, we have to change the way we think. as we go through physical possessions, we can look at each object and ask, is this beautiful, is this useful, is this something that i really want to help identify who i am? if the answer to any of these is no, we can let it go. the same process applies to thoughts. why even hold on to useless, crappy thoughts for even one more nanosecond?

losing friends is another thing altogether. sometimes, we need to look within and re-evaluate our contributions and then change, and other times, a blessing in disguise leads to its demise or a self-preservation mechanism kicks in, with or without the assistance of guardian angels.

one time, in a land far, far away, i was the editor of a newspaper, and in my fastidious pursuit of perfection, i stiffened up just enough to lose a friend. being able to let go has loosened me up so much that imperfection is no longer bothersome. in fact, it doesn’t even really exist. imperfection, serving its function perfectly, is perfect.

so now to some handy advice: clear out the crap. create uncluttered, open space. in uncluttered, open space, it’s very easy to see the telephone or the keys, and to remember where the car is parked. if you’re not ready for something so radical, then put your mittens on strings, make little notes, ‘hook for purse’ and ‘keys go here’, and tape them to the place where the things belong. have a notebook handy to write things down, like ‘car on hollis street between duke and george, meter expires at 12:15’. and finally, take a few minutes at the end of every day to empty your mind, and the recycle bin that lives inside it.

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