Friday, June 11, 2010

De-clutter Your Life

About a month ago, I wrote about “Treasures of the Heart”. Since that time our family has bought another house. Buying another house, means that we need to sell our house. This also means we need to de-clutter our house and get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated over the years.

So for one week we worked to got rid of some of the things that we could “never do without out” or “never part with”. We are now living in an uncluttered house, a house that is clean and free of the junk that just took up space, but had no purpose. I believe that we need to do this regularly, rather than every 10 years or so. My husband and I helped each other in deciding what each of us no longer needed. We had to remind each other of that several times. He would say to me: why would you keep that? And I would have to answer with a “good enough” reason. In the end we both realized if we hadn’t used it in a year and it was not a holiday item – pitch it! De-cluttering is so freeing and you will find yourself in a place of less stuff, more space and a place for everything that you really do need to keep.

It was amazing to me the stuff we had accumulated. The things that in the past were a treasure. But, as we worked our way through cleaning out our closets, we wondered “why did we keep this?” Or even worse “What is it?” :)

Isn’t that how our spiritual lives can be, too? We keep the old “treasures”. Hold onto things that seem to have so much value or maybe just something we cannot let go of. So we pack up these memories, these events, sometimes these are painful memories or events. But we pack up these “things” that we cling to. We put them in boxes and store them in closets of our lives. “Just in case” or “maybe someday”.


I believe that periodically it is good to unpack the boxes of our personal and spiritual lives and make some decisions. We all have things that we keep in the “box of our life” that really don’t need to be in our lives. In regards to these things consider this: Does it serve a good purpose? Is it a necessity for my life? Does it really need to be kept?

Maybe with the help of someone who knows you well, I would encourage you to periodically unpack the things in your “lifebox”. Make some tough decisions and then get rid of the things that are just filling your life, but are not beneficial to your life. The things that just take up space and keep us bound to something that has no real meaning. The painful events and memories that we hang onto, when it would be so much better to let them go and move on.

De-clutter your life. I really believe you will be glad that you did.