Mental Clutter

Though my January issue of Better Homes & Gardens was a bit thin, the cover was still very enticing. I mean just take a look at it (see picture to the left). Everything is bright (very spring like) and I could see that being a nice area for me to write in. Everything has a place and the area is nice and neat just the way most of us like it—even if we are not quite there yet. ~Smile~ But like losing weight, getting organized or decluttering are also one of the top 5 New Years Resolutions.

While walking through Walmart last week I noticed they had huge displays of different sized organizational containers. The displays weren’t there 2 weeks ago or right before the New Year. Like losing weight we can get all hyped up about getting organized and decluttering our homes. And the retailers know this trend and try to sell us a bunch of containers to help us achieve our goal. And as I was looking through my magazine and reading the articles on decluttering, I began to think about how much mental clutter we have, yet we often don’t think about how that affects us on a daily bases.

Personally, I cannot sleep well in a cluttered room. Was I always that way…nope! I used to have an exercise bike that basically housed 2 weeks worth of clothing, and my dresser top would be loaded with things that needed to be put away, my TV usually had books or magazines piled on top of it (before flat screens) and the night table wasn’t much better….but that was then and this is now, and the older I get the more I can’t stand clutter. And I know that I am not alone in how clutter can affect my emotional well being. So if sitting in a cluttered room can make you uncomfortable, how does our mental clutter affect us? So what did I come up with? Well….

….I think most of our outward clutter is the result of the inward clutter of the mind. Now this is just my personal opinion and I’m looking at who I was when I lived in clutter versus who I am today. I’m not talking about the teen years (that is a horse of a different color all together) but I’m talking about being an adult with my own space. When I think about the bedroom that looked like a hurricane hit it, emotionally I was all over the place. It wasn’t that I had not been trained in how to keep a neat home and pick up my clothes…no that was not the case. The problem was, for one I didn’t care, and I was so busy doing this-that and the-other. But it seems that as I began to grow in the Lord by taking time to sit and be quiet and let all the voices and mish-mash of my brain calm down, life began to look differently to me. Just like the long overdue cleaning of an overstuffed closet, my mind needed sifting through and things needed to be discarded and put away.

In order to think, (meditate) we need quiet. Okay you can listen to soft music—maybe? But it is hard to think when someone else is talking to us or at us. We are so busy in our lives we often miss the opportunity to be quiet and just think. Or for some of us, we run from sitting and being quiet because we are purposely trying not to deal with the issues (or clutter) of our minds.

Take for instance that exercise bike that housed my clothing to the point you almost didn’t recognize what it was. I often wondered if I was also trying to hide the fact that I had begged God for the money to buy the thing and then realized I hated riding it, and guess what? That’s right…I didn’t.

Before you tackle that closet or all the clutter you have lying around, sit down and ask yourself, “How did it get like this?” The answer should give you the best starting point for change.

Sisters, do you have outward clutter that is a symptom of your inward clutter? If so, what do you plan to do about it?



Love & Hugs
Ponnie

See you tomorrow!