Emotional Clutter

I subscribe to a variety of blogs on minimalist living, thrifty living, budget style and so on.  One of these is "Be More With Less".  She has a guest blogger today - Betsy Talbot - who writes the blog Married With Luggage.

Here is an extract (with my comments interspersed)

Do you know the feeling you get when you’ve finished a big decluttering project? There is a sense of accomplishment and peace, the knowledge you will have less stress each day, and the satisfaction of moving one step closer to the ideal life you want to live. In short, you have more confidence.

You no longer have to close the door, hide from company, or ignore a room anymore, and you can have the full use of your space for living.

Emotional Clutter

If physical simplicity can give you this much pleasure and confidence in your life, imagine what a decluttering of your soul can do. We’re all walking around with interior rooms overflowing with stories from our past, expectations from society, and dreams for our future, and not all of it fits the “useful or beautiful” mantra of simplistic living.

When we hold on to stories from our past, especially when they are not entirely true, we stop living in the present. (And let’s face it, these stories get heavily clouded in opinion and emotion over time.) A bad breakup is still affecting your current relationship, or something your mother or a friend said years ago impacts the decisions you make today.

Trying to live up (or down) to the ideals society has for you can suffocate your talents and magnify your weaknesses. When you live your life for someone else, you have to stock your mind and soul with all kinds of extras you wouldn’t normally need. The clear path you could walk when living the life you want turns into a cloverleaf highway with off-ramps and detours with all the “shoulds” you have to remember as you make your way through a life you don’t particularly want.

If we get stuck in our pasts we cannot move forward in our lives.  Sometimes that "stuckness" can be about how nothing is more important than losing weight.  And that once we lose weight we will then be able to have high self esteem and confidence.  When in fact the opposite is true.  Unless we esteem ourselves, we will never care about ourselves enough to  do what is necessary to lose weight.  

Our dreams also clutter up our space – but only if we fail to pair them with action. When you don’t regularly achieve your dreams – big and small – you leave no room for new dreams to come into your life. The sad truth is that dreams typically have an expiration date, and keeping one too long without actually doing anything about it is like opening a container of yogurt past the due date. The safety seal won’t keep it from going bad if you don’t eat it in time. Keeping your dreams on the shelf is a sure way to kill them and keep new ones from emerging.

A dream of a slender body can remain merely a dream for an entire life if we don't pair it with action.  And the action need not be dramatic - we all have a picture of an overnight revelation in which all of our  "bad" habits disappear and we are transformed permanently.  This is mythical , wishful thinking.  Transformation is one french fry at a time, one walk around the block, on small social activity that you've been avoiding.  Transformation is knowing that you only have to lose 1kg.  And once that has been lost, you only have 1 kg to lose - whether or not your total is 10 or 200kg to lose. Real change is both in thinking and behaviour.

So declutter those past hurts and past failures from your emotions.  They are the worst kind of excess baggage. Think of all that extra space you'll have in your head and your heart to focus on self care.