It’s what country folks call a “lived in” home, which is
basically just a nice way of saying “It could use a little housekeeping.” It’s
not that I don’t like housekeeping. To the contrary, I actually love cleaning
my house. There’s nothing more relaxing than a day with no books to pack, no
meetings to attend. Just me and a blank calendar page where I can stay in AND
clean my home. But when in the course of a working day (which is every day on a
farm, btw) given the choice of tidying my space or checking on critters I’m bad
to overlook the piles mounting up and convince myself “It’ll keep.” (Problem is,
it does keep. And it keeps on keeping until I have a serious clean up day and
start to purge.)
You know it’s bad when you watch that hoarder show to feel
good about yourself. But it’s extra bad when you google hoarding to check for
early warning signs.
My best friend (who is dangerously creative and equally
messy) blames it on creativity. What others see as a toss-able widgit, sparks all
new ideas in us. Granted we may never get around to implementing said idea, but you never know. We might. Probably best we keep it just in case.
Then there’s the whole “out of sight, out of mind” thing. If
I’ve got several projects working, I need ‘em visible. When I start filing
things away, it pretty much means I’m done.
But when I really want to get serious about cleaning I have
a trick that works most every time and that trick is “have company over." For
reasons probably more co-dependent than hospitable, I’ll clean my house for a
guest where I won’t for myself. (What’s up with that? Am I not worth it?)
When I checked that hoarding warning list, I must confess, I
was in there. Not all of them, but enough to make me pause…
-Difficulty getting rid of things
…Check.
-Clutter in office, home or
car…Check. Check. Check.
-Feeling overwhelmed by the amount
of clutter backing up. Big ol check.
Fortunately I don’t take a lot of free items, like flyers
or sugar packets and I was safe on stockpiling as I’m working on tossing the junk
I already have, but it was enough to start me thinking about the bigger
picture, as in “What’s with us and our stuff?
I am not proud of the clutter on my desk or in my basement,
but as a control measure I’m forbidding myself to rent a pod because once
it’s out of site, it truly is only benefitting the one I’d be paying each
month, cause face it, I’m not gonna go visit my junk. So if this is the case,
why not toss it now?
I don’t have a clear cut answer for that, but I’m not
resting til I find one. It’s a burr in my saddle…a pea under my mattress. My
hunch is there is something much deeper going on in our cultural psyche…that what’s
driving our compulsion toward filling our lives and our spaces with more stuff
is a misguided longing for something to fill us…inside. Perhaps it’s a spiritual
need we’ve chosen not to face.
One thing’s for sure: physical stuff is a poor substitute for whatever it is we ARE looking to fill our
lives with and I suspect that until we clear the clutter out, there won’t be
room for the good and the meaningful to enter in.
Until I figure it out, I hold as my barometer, the last
warning sign of potential hoarding which is: Refuses to invite others over for
shame or embarrassment.
If my friends ever take second place to my stuff, just go
ahead and commit me. A true friend will overlook your dust bunnies (and if she's creative like you, she might even help you name 'em). And fortunately, where my friends are concerned, they are either graciously forgiving
or equally messy themselves.
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