As we head into the new year, I hope that you are at peace with your choice of New Year’s resolutions, or perhaps your choice to forgo them. Myself, I don’t like to have resolutions at the beginning of the year. Instead, I have ongoing, shifting intentions that I revisit frequently throughout the year. So, this isn’t typically a time that I tend to start big new endeavors.
However, starting out this new year has turned out to be shifting for me.
This year, I made the choice one day to clean out one of the cupboards in my kitchen. This particular cabinet had been disorganized for years. It happened to be where I stored my hand mixer – the one I use primarily to make cakes or scones.
Typically, when I needed to fetch the mixer, I first had to dig through a random assortment of jars, a variety of mismatched and non-nestable cake pans, and even a ridiculous amount of equipment for a fish tank that hadn’t been operational in 3 years. Sometimes, I would find these items tumbling out onto the floor, and I would curse and mutter about needing to clean out the cabinet. It was treacherous. Inevitably, my entire body would tense up and I would find myself narrowly escaping with the mixer, only then to struggle to find the beaters. Yes, this happened each and every time.
Until one day when I was wanting to whip up a batch of cookies. When I went to get the mixer, I again found my body tensing up and obscenities starting to roll off my tongue. And then it struck me. I could fix this. I could make the choice to change this situation.
Maybe subliminally I had been waiting for somebody else in my house to do it? My husband does love to cook, and I do have a daughter that loves to organize and rearrange.
Maybe I never felt like I had the time?
Maybe I just didn’t want to do it because it didn’t sound fun.
Maybe it just never occurred to me that I could make that choice for myself.
But on this day, as I tried to get the mixer out without anything tumbling onto me or onto the floor, I was struck with the awareness that the discomfort of this particular disorganization far exceeded the discomfort that I would likely experience in just fixing this problem.
So I did it. I rearranged, I threw away, I organized. Just this one cabinet.
It took no more than 7 minutes to declutter and organize. I had been putting this off for years. And it took 7 minutes.
The change was amazing! Not only could I get the mixer out with such ease, but I also found a vase that I had been trying to find for a very long time!
The realization struck me hard that I could have done this a long time ago and saved myself the existential angst associated with needing to bake a simple birthday cake.
“The discomfort of not addressing the clutter—whether physical or emotional—far exceeds the discomfort of simply fixing it.”
What I gained that day was priceless. I gained clarity and freedom. Maybe this sounds overly dramatic – it was just a single kitchen cabinet after all. But I cannot overstate the impact on made on me.
Thus began a two-week period where I would clean out other areas that had become untenable.
As I made these changes in my physical world, I was surprised to find that my brain also started naturally decluttering itself.
So often our outer worlds are intrinsically tied to our inner worlds in ways we can’t begin to fathom or understand. I noticed that the tense feeling I had been experiencing in my body when I needed to retrieve the mixer was almost identical to the feeling in my body when I chose to ignore my own internal boundaries – the boundaries I knew I needed to set for myself.
Maybe subliminally I had been waiting for somebody else to do it?
Maybe I never felt like I had the time?
Maybe I just didn’t want to do it because it didn’t sound fun.
Maybe it just never occurred to me that I could make that choice for myself.
I now realized that, as with the mixer situation, the discomfort of not listening to my own boundaries far exceeded the discomfort that I would likely experience in just fixing the problem.
And I began to pay a little more attention to what my body and my soul knew both in my physical world and in my inner world.
Sometimes all it will take is a tweak here and a shift there to dispel some of that negative energy. Sometimes it will take a bit more or even a lot more.
As I continue to clean up some of these pieces of my life, it still surprises me how often I think – “I should have just done that sooner.”
What are you needing to clean up (literally or figuratively) in your home or in your life? No matter when you do it, you will likely say, “Why didn’t I do that sooner?” Now is good. Do it now.
If you are looking for a little help seeing past your own clutter, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with me.
I’d love to share this new feeling of energy with you.
