Energy Bank Account

     I wake up each day asking, "How will I spend this day?" and by "spend" I mean just that.
     Each morning before feet hit the floor, lists get tackled and action gets underway, I contemplate the expenditure of what magically, mystically got deposited overnight in the bank account of my life. I ask myself,  "Where, Evins, will you spend your allotment of energy today?
     It's not a financial account, mind you...but an energy fund -- funded by the Universe through the miracle of sleep, exchange for which is mine alone to direct toward those areas I choose (wisely or foolishly, for better or worse).
      Funding of this account is completely unearned. It's a gift...an inheritance of sorts... deposited in the silence of sleep in account bearing my name (otherwise known as my life).
     I can exchange this currency responsibly--give it over to my work, my writing, my creations...
     I can exchange it for relationships--for those I care about,  the people and causes I feel called to help, or those I just enjoy being with.
     I can even exchange them for my own selfish pleasure if I so choose... A mindless TV show here, a book I've been longing to curl up with...there. It's easy to waste these units if you're not careful. We're an ADD culture that loses piles of this currency to distractions like Facebook or On Demand or computer games.
     No matter what I choose, this is one exchange unit I can never get back. Once it's spent, it's spent. Yes, Lord willing, if I wake again tomorrow, there'll likely be something in the account. (Some days more; some days less...Lots has to do with how I spent yesterday's units, and the day before that, and the day before that.)
      Call it God, credit angels, call it life, but that's how I view sleep and how I approach each day and this gift called "energy" which I'm sad to say, I have, in my past, too often taken for granted.
      I fall asleep literally "spent" and wake up account renewed~ For the life of me I do not know how it happens, nor did I in any way earn the life force that made its way back in.  All I know is to be gifted with another day means the least I can do is mindfully consider those things I choose to spend my energy on. I open my eyes asking "How best can I spend it today?" or "Can I do better today than yesterday?"
     Good or bad, my stewardship of this account is mine to manage and the older I get the more I conscientious I've become of just where I'll place my energy and how I'll invest my time.
 

Rule #4 --Clear the Clutter

           Clearly I'm an angel on this one (for I continue to harp) ~But given this has been one of the tougher ones to rewire, please allow me to delineate. A tangent of the simplification step just referenced, but clutter comes in many varieties, both seen and unseen...

1)    There’s physical clutter.

Deeper than just clearing a closet or tossing a stack, I’ve been digging deep into my psyche to get my mind around how we've come to where we are. Since when did hoarding become a mental disorder and stuff management a new profession? Turns out (big surprise) it happened mindlessly...once again, when we weren't looking. No one sets out to become a clutter bug. Common sense says less is best...less to trip over, move around, store or stash. But still, we’ve become a nation of compulsive addicts, seduced by point of purchase displays and "own it now" marketing tricks, after which we wind up at the Container Store looking for cute plastic to store it all in.

How "more is best" slipped into our cultural consciousness is beyond me, but it happened when we weren’t looking. Now that we're here we’re either too attached, too familiar or just too overworked to have the energy to do anything about it, meanwhile "it" sits there silently sucking what little energy we have left into thin air. Real easy to miscalculate how much energy stuff takes to keep up with. Nothing slows the wheels of creativity and life energy like a big ol bunch of clutter (on our desks, on our desktops...now in our heads and our lives).

2)    As if physical, tangible stuff isn't enough, now there's e-clutter. They advised us in our smart phone class to clean our boxes out at least once a day to save battery life. Window after window on top of window and you'll be searching for your plug in half the time.  I seldom ditch old texts and you don’t even want to see my "in" basket. Seven pictures to get to one good one, but do I  delete the unused ones? (Not until I’m about to upload and back up, which then requires a blocked day to accomplish.) All that unnecessary stuff drains a battery you know, and it's doing the same thing to us. It wasn’t until I started thinking like Einstein (E=mc2) that this one really hit home: stuff is energy. Give me energy any day. If I’ll have more for clearing out a few things, then watch me clear. Energy is mandatory for life....a currency you want a steady supply of! Stuff? It's just stuff. (And there's plenty more where that came from.)

For me this means nieces get dish ware for their first apartments,  friends get stemware, old college notebooks get burned in the bin and Goodwill gets to know me on a first name basis. I’ve actually made a game of it. Everyday at least 5 things leave this house...Some get recycled. Some get re-purposed. Most get trashed. I've recently informed my closest friends that Xmas is coming early this year. It may be that candle they've long admired or my great grandmother’s favorite dish, but I’m daring to share…Each transaction leaves a bit more breathing space and while others might not spot it, I can feel the difference.  Like Dave Ramsey's debt snowball, the process gains momentum once you make the shift. There comes a tipping point at which it becomes sport and when you hit that point, Katie bar the door! It's a pretty neat rush!

3)    And speaking of Ramsey, there’s no worse clutter than financial clutter. (Again, guilty as charged.) It’s one thing to pay your bills on time. It’s another to throw everything onto autopay to the point you haven’t a clue what’s mounting and for how long.

I'm bad about this one. In order to make sure everyone got theirs, I hadn’t noticed when cable bills skyrocketed and insurance premiums changed. Time to redirect the focus here as well. End of the day, be it purchases, payments or products now stacking up and backing up, when I stop long enough to ask "Do I really need 2 of those just because it's a BOGO?" it makes a difference. Awareness of what’s coming in and (too often NOT) going out of your house, your checkbook, your life...it's an eye-opener! We’ve become a nation of sleepwalking, phone texting robots with mindlessness replacing mindfulness. Time to wake up and smell the coffee. Checking inventory, then reducing inventory ...it's not just for business anymore.

Picturing a Life with Less

   

     Remember the day when our cameras needed these for an inside shot? Remember when "instant" meant your camera spit out a square piece of cardboard with the picture magically appearing before your eyes five minutes later?
     It hit me as I sat down to organize three years of pictures yesterday. I'd sought the help of a professional (Who knew iPhoto locks up when you hit 10,000?) My computer had slowed to a snail's pace. I'd been watching that spinning beach ball so much I was starting to hear seagulls.
     Then it hit me~ My Mac looks like my garage! My desktop resembles... my desktop! The signs are no longer coming in three's ...They're coming in droves. And the common denominator is me. The underlying problem: too much stuff!
     This "stuff" stuff is really starting to bug me. Rather than sort through cluttered computer files I needed to dig into my cluttered mind to find just what is driving this need in me to hold onto so much stuff! So far, here's what I've come up with:
     1) I'm sentimental. I can point to any cup, bookend, candlestick holder and tell you where it came from, who gave it to me and/or what the nice lady was wearing as she rang up the sale .... Forget where I put my phone last, but show me a mug and I can remember the tiniest of details in its story~
     2) I'm creative. As if having too much stuff isn't bad enough,  I need to see my stuff... in plain view...for sure when working on a project, but sometimes (most times) even after.  Time to make pickles? Every jar, every ingredient, every possible pan and bowl (whether I use them or not) must be  visible, or else, I'll forget something. Same goes for laying out cookbook pages. Same goes for paying bills. My business partner once got me a book called "Organizing for Creatives" ...It basically said to color code things by projects. Now my stuff has a rainbow between its layers. Didn't change a thing, it just added pretty colors.
     3) I'm busy. Putting stuff away takes time and given the choice of putting it back, cleaning it up, tucking it away OR taking that phone call...well hey, it's just me. The dogs don't care. Heck, they even can't see the counters. I'll tidy up this evening. Only by evening, I'm too tired to tidy.
     4) ... (You get the gist. This list could go on and on.)
     Upon deeper reflection I DID stumble upon an answer, and a simple one at that, which is GET RID of things, Evins. And if you ever get good at that, QUIT BUYING MORE!
     I'm not trying to halt the economy, but if I never bought another piece of clothing as long as I live I couldn't wear mine out. Like most everyone, I go to my closet each morning, peruse an endless variety of wardrobe options, then reach for my same favorite "T", and my same comfy prairie skirt...Subconscious takes over and unless I have a key presentation or something fancy to attend, my  choices follow a very narrow pattern of selectivity.  Who am I kidding? I'm never going to wear that top I bought three years ago because it was on sale~ You think I could at least start there. Heck, sale things don't pack a bunch of sentiment (except for thinking, "Aw...Mom was with me that day. She bought a belt to go with a purse and we laughed about....." Yep. That's part of the problem. I assign meaning and memories to everything, which makes it hard to let anything go....You can only imagine me trying to sell a goat. It's a miracle I didn't keep every single one of Rosey's puppies~)
     It's not that I don't clear things out regularly. I do. I've got girlfriends I swap things with ("swap" being the operative word there). I know the people at Goodwill on a first name basis. But despite my myriad trips with boxes packed with purses, boots and pans, stuff keeps on accumulating. It's like it's breeding in there behind closed doors.
     It's an endless cycle of accumulation...frustration...deliberation, and then BOOM. It's outta here. I do haul things regularly. But like some homing pigeon, my stuff  always finds its way back home, meaning something in my internal wiring has got to shift.
     There is an old Buddhist proverb that states: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. In this case, my teacher was on tape.
     While packing up boxes, I was listening to a book on organizing (which is technically moving your stuff around) when one statement stood out as if the author was speaking to me.  It had to do with the energy of stuff...namely how much it consumes. We lose time sorting through it, tripping over it, dodging it. We dread facing it, tearing into it, deciding what stays and what goes. In short, whether we've stacked it neatly or not, it's there, reminding us ever so silently that all is not clear in our world. When she spoke of stuff as energy, and how in removing stuff, you get more energy in exchange, THEN it hit me. If there is anything in this physical universe I revere, it's energy. Energy to get things done. Energy to enjoy life. It was a sudden paradigm shift to think of energy as an exchange unit. Heretofore, I had considered money as a possible exchange, peace of mind as an exchange, a neater house as an exchange. But not once had I factored pure energy as the resulting gift from ridding space of its stuff.
     It was an "aha" moment like none other. I can't tell you that it'll all be gone by morning. But there is a new carrot dangling before me now and that is "If you walked in your house tomorrow, Evins, and there stood a clean desk...an empty corner...the five item you use (but no more) in your bathroom cabinet...WHAT would that FEEL like?"
     Obviously, I'll have to get back to you on this, as I've never felt this feeling, save for the first days of moving in, but I honestly think it would feel freeing.
     Before going overboard, I'm going to try it with one small corner of my world, just to make sure. But I think it would feel freeing. Contemplating it sure feels freeing...
     Back with a report.
     Film at 11.
     Stay tuned...(cause if I pull this off, it WILL be breaking news.)