Purge: Time to De-clutter!

This blog post speaks to the things in our lives that we push aside and don’t deal with. We think those things go away, but they never do. In order to keep our road clear, we need to de-clutter!

Cleaning and organizing my house has become quite a regular occurrence lately. It's not an easy process.

This weekend I found myself having to do another purge of some areas around my house. The process was long, but I found it strangely liberating. Cleaning and organizing my house has become quite a regular occurrence lately. It's not an easy process. It entails emptying out everything in that space, deconstructing the entire place, and then having to look at everything all at once. It can be quite daunting; however, you can't truly clean a space, without taking everything out piece by piece, sorting everything: throwing away the things that are broken or unusable, giving away those things that you don't use anymore, but others may be able to, and then putting back the things you need and want. Sometimes you find things that need to be cleaned. Sometimes you unearth things that you haven't seen in quite a long time, and end up taking a trip down memory lane. Sometimes you find things that you didn't even know were there, things that you can use, and things that you have no idea why you even kept in the first place.

I remember that my son used to clean his room and then I would come, open a closet, and almost be knocked out by the mass of items that would be stuffed in that little space. It wasn't truly clean; it was just made to look like it on the surface.

I would come, open a closet, and almost be knocked out by the mass of items that would be stuffed in that little space!

It is just like life. Everything that you go through in your life is there; there are some things that affect your reactions, why you do what you do, and why you feel how you feel, and until you really uncover those things and look at them, you won't really see what's cluttering up your life. I guess if you don't do any self-reflection in your life, you're bound to have emotional clutter. I guess I didn't think of emotional baggage the same way I think about cleaning a space in my home, but it makes total sense to me. I guess everything has to be purged. As I have been looking back over my life, I realize that there was so much residue, so much I haven't purged from my life that its affects were hanging on me like cobwebs. The interesting thing is that I thought I was a person who constantly reflected on things that happened in my life. As a teacher you are taught to do that every day! Though I am that person, I didn't realize that there were things that I hadn't thought through. Things I just learned to compartmentalize so I wouldn't have to think about them, because it would make me anxious or sad.

Time out for avoiding things that are uncomfortable!

Well, time out for avoiding things that are uncomfortable. It's time that I deal with things that may be ugly and awkward, so that I can deal with what I can see and throw away things that have no place in my life anymore, and hinder me from doing and being all that I was meant to be.

Don't let things that you are afraid of or that make you uncomfortable keep you stagnant and block your progress. There are times in your life when you will have to do some de-cluttering of your path, and sometimes it will be difficult to face, ugly to look at, and dirty, heavy-lifting. However, if you invest your time in the process, your path will be much easier to maneuver and you can keep it moving with no hindrances!