How good to be back here after a busy time of extra projects! Yes, lots got accomplished for me and for clients but that meant not having time to check in at my favorite Starbuck for a major dose of Java and some pleasant study time. I hadn't been there in 6 months— not since we moved to the country. The place is not on my beaten path now but I like it best there. It is large and lots of interesting meetings take place so it is ideal for people-watching. So, I made a special trip to go there.
I sat close to a group of youngish matrons who were discussing a school project. Nice looking women all dressed in jeans and with notebooks and lattes on the table. I wasn't paying much attention to them while I was studying until my Reticular Activating System tuned into the word, "disorganized" as their volume rose. Emotions were charged up, for sure. That caused me to look up from my arm chair only two feet away.
A spirited conversation ensued with every one of them chiming in with a personal story about the challenge of holding their lives together on the home front. It sounded like utter chaos ruled pretty much in every household represented. One talked about her messy office, another about her 'inadequate storage space in her kitchen,' still another about her cluttered closets. Locating keys got worked over with one woman offering the solution common in organizing books: put them in a container or on a hook near the door.
My point is that getting organized is a big deal and is on most of our minds. Seems to me, as I work as a professional organizer in my coaching business, that a lot of us are indiscriminate acquisitors—we just add too many things into our lives and they start to pile up and then drain our energy keeping track of them. (There are organized packrats and unorganized ones.) The major reason it weighs us down is that we own stuff we don't even realize we have. And in my personal experience a lot of it we don't need because we don't even really like it.
The more I organize for other people the closer I look at what I own and the less I want to own or display. A china cabinet glutted with stuff is neither attractive nor useful.
Years ago, I got a lesson from an interior designer friend of mine. She lived by choice in a mostly beige house. But she came to town to work and stayed with our family. She loved our house and its colors. She would wander around and smile.
I was going through my "Early American period of decorating about then and one day I was complaining because there was a lot to dust. She tactfully suggested that I take every accessory out of my living room for three days. "You will get used to seeing less or needing to." She was absolutely right. She advised me to make a list of my goodies and divide the list into three sections: Winter (when it is dreary) Spring/Summers (when it is light and sunny) and Fall (when things feel transitional.) Then I was to assign each of the goodies to one of the times of year to display it. This started in the Fall so I kept out the appropriate set to display and put everything else away. Every 'season' I rotated the look. I put it on my calendar and enjoyed the hour it took to change the look. It was liberating to have only 3 items on a table and be able to really see them and enjoy them for 4 months and then create a new look when the next rotation came.
The surprise came when I put things away each time and looked at them with new eyes. I realized that some needed to go, maybe to a friend who had admired something or to charity. Over the years, a process of elimination took place and it was cathartic for me.
I will leave you with this quote by William Morris—a guaranteed cure for clutter:
"Have nothing that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
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