How the heck is it June!?
It’s June and we are nearly half way through 2017, I don’t know about you but it has flown by for me. For some of us, this year has not been what we planned for at the beginning of the year. I have seen it with my friends, at work and even for myself. A lot of us started off the year pretty strong, but we have veered off the path we saw for ourselves and now have to reconfigure.
So this month, we are going to look around and figure out how to get ourselves back on track!!
Generally, when I think about organization I am talking about one of two things; stuff and time. I almost always start with stuff because I sincerely believe that living in a tidy, clean space can free your mind to be more creative and productive. We will talk about time later this month.
Starting with stuff…
If you have sat with me for more than 10 minutes in the last year, I have probably told you how much I love the book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo.
For those of you that haven’t…. I love it! I read the book at a time in my life when I felt like I really had no control over so many of the things going on around me. When I read Kondo’s claim that if I followed her method, I would never be cluttered again, I thought that sounded like a crazy and impossible challenge, there was no way. I think she is on to something.
The first challenge in the book is to sit in a space and think about what you want to do, who you want to be and how you want to feel in that space. That is before you get rid of a single thing, before you reorganize a thing. I enjoyed this exercise. It had me thinking about rooms differently than I had in the past. It wasn’t about how it looked but more about how it felt.
The second is to start purging. I’m not going to go through her entire method but the core of it all is that if it doesn’t spark joy, it is time to let it go. As I looked around my rooms, I realized that I had a lot of things around me that weren’t really me. Some didn’t fit who I am today, though they once had. And others never did but they were gifts or hand-me-downs and I felt obligated to keep them. I gave myself permission to shed them.
Finally, she is not a big proponent of buying organization stuff. As much as I love the Container Store even now, she doesn’t believe you need more stuff to get your current stuff organized. Basically, she says that if you only have things that spark joy, you can find a way to organize them that does not require that you go out and purchase a bunch things to put them in, you often use things you already have.
And then...
So it’s been nearly a year and a half since I read the book and I have donated, sold or trashed roughly over two dozen trash bags worth of stuff and I still find myself checking if things spark joy or if it is time to let them go. I had no idea I had that much stuff!!
I understand why she says you won’t go back to the way that you once were because it is so much better with things tidied up! It is easier to keep things clean, it is easier to relax, and it is easier to just do life without stuff in the way. I don’t want to go back to how things were before so I can see why she would make the claim that you won’t go back or ‘relapse.’
Time
Time is the only thing we can never have more of. Love and time are the only things of value we can’t buy. After going through and really cleaning, purging and sorting things I have more time to think, work, live than I did before. Cleaning feels like less of a chore and more like self care than it ever has before and I often do it without even really noticing.
If you aren’t in love with your space or how you feel in your space, I challenge you to look around and think about how to love it more. How to love your time more.
(Just a quick note, I am not an affiliate of nor do will I be paid in any way for my support for any of the sites/books/products I discuss in this post.)