One of my best friends turned me onto the magic of decluttering. I tend to be an extremely disorganized, messy person, but I try to keep everything clean. Most of my mess is just reshuffling old stuff around to make room for other junk. Nothing in the stack was dirty or even necessarily broken, and if it was broken, it was just a project in the works.
My studio was at one point my favorite room in the entire house, but my spouse kept pushing me to shovel our spillover in. The room eventually wasn’t full of musical equipment, but tools and clutter. My friend had come down for a few days and we could barely use the studio when he first got here. It took a bit, but we ended up trying to clean it, and the only way forward was to downsize junk. The studio needed to be decluttered.
Space and Time
My space had become as suffocating as a busy street down a narrow alley. The room had become a closet that felt like a coffin from the excess. I hadn’t thought about it, but I had been avoiding the room for quite a while. It wasn’t intentional, but it was the truth.
To clean everything would have taken forever and been extremely hard, but the less stuff there was the quicker and easier it would be. My friend had been moving around a bunch and gone between large and small places downsizing time and time again. He had gotten to be an expert at decluttering his stuff.
We basically had the choice between space and time to get everything organized. A lot of messes come down to having the space to move things, or having the time to sort everything out and figure out where it could be stored to minimize impact on usability. The less stuff though, and the less space and the less time necessary to deal with it. We chose the third way and started decluttering fast.
Time and Space
Time and space had brought me all of the junk in the first place. The time for it to accumulate and the space for it to be put. It had been ordered at one point, but entropy caught up. My belongings had become cobwebs of apathy scattered in every corner.
My mess wasn’t just trash. Many things were perfectly good, perfectly functional, and almost everything had a reason to be there… or at least so I thought. Anything that wasn’t in working order was a project actively in the works. A lot of things were still there because they were projects from before my daughter was born that we just hadn’t gotten to yet.
The Catalyst
I was ready to throw out some stuff and cut my losses. It had been years since I had done more than shuffle around some items, but I was struggling to really pull the trigger on getting rid of most things. My friend reached a point of extreme frustration with my good-intentioned hoarding (and the path to hell is paved with good intentions). If nothing else, one thing he said cut through my mind and ignited a newfound perspective.
“Your time’s at a premium, when’s the last time you worked on any of your ‘projects’?”
It hit me. I hadn’t worked on any of these projects in ages because I had more pressing concerns. I had spent my time with family or with my hobbies. I hadn’t abandoned anything fully, but I had cut the time I spent on certain things to the point I may as well have not bothered. I could live without missing most of these projects at this point.
Once this revelation truly sunk in, I realized I had been stubbornly holding onto things which weren’t really anything I cared about. I didn’t have to throw away the things I loved, but I was throwing away my time with them by holding onto junk. I had planned to fix some things, resell others, but most ended up at a charity outreach by the end of the week. My friend was right, I had better things to do than juggle junk, my time was too precious to waste on dead dreams and empty actions.
Exodus
We started with an area that was about 12 square feet, including us, to work with the room. The very first goal was to keep all of the junk in the room unless it was going away for good. We sorted items into piles ranging from trash that was of no use to anyone, to things which could be donated, things which could be sold, and things which belonged elsewhere. The first pile of useless junk was hauled out and recycled or trashed. The second pile was tossed into old boxes and moved out of the way, but the third pile was kept as a way to incentivize throwing out more stuff (the pile kept shrinking throughout the night). Our final pile was moved to where it belonged, but only if it could fit (anything else was downsized).
Within a few short hours, the floor had grown to where the edges of the area rug were usable again, and everything was roughly where it belonged. Duplicate sets were downsized where possible, keeping the best only. Cable boxes were emptied, and shelves were emptied and filled how they should have been in the first place. The room grew to be massive. My friend hadn’t thrown away a single item without my consent either. Every single item had been individually judged.
The Metamorphosis
I doubt my friend expected the change that occurred. I know I didn’t. The change itself hit hard and fast. The truth is, the change had already been underway; my friend and this mess had just been a catalyst to my sudden growth.
My quest towards a more mindful life and my meditation had laid the pathway. I had dabbled in both, but never really taken the dive I needed. This was my wake-up call to apply theory to practice.
Each piece of junk I threw out was a holdout to my metamorphosis leaving the house. I was holding onto the hope of tasks I didn’t even enjoy all that much and felt obliged to complete. I had wasted time in my studio because I wouldn’t throw out an old laptop or a broken device and avoided it instead. My problem was that I could fix them. My problem also was I didn’t care to. Nothing was really pushing me, so I had procrastinated on even procrastinating because I felt bad just being in there. I had made excuses as to why I kept so much junk when I could have just made music or art instead.
Choosing Appreciation
I had chosen to appreciate the things I cared about. It’s easy to say you choose to appreciate what you have, but how can you really appreciate a hundred different things as much as only one? Too many choices poisoned the action of choice itself.
There were too many tasks I could choose to do, and more often than not, I ended up not choosing any. By throwing out the dead-ends themselves, I threw out doubt of what I can do in my free time. When I opened the door hiding my mess, I opened the door to my time.
I’ve made more music and been more productive than before. I appreciate my studio and I appreciate my time. Even though it’s not spotless or perfect, my studio is open again. It was never really closed, but I had closed it off from myself by letting it get cluttered. I had grown to unknowingly hate it by letting my mind wander in it and not being mindful of what I was losing with each well-intentioned project dragged into the house. My projects were really my failure to admit I didn’t want to do them even though they seemed like positive things.
Flying Away
I have a lot more to do to truly clean out the space, but it’s not an insurmountable task anymore. There’s a clear path forward and the light at the end of the tunnel is clear. I wouldn’t have been in this mess had I been more mindful of what I was doing. I let myself lie to myself about my intentions and each lie was a physical object in my studio. I threw away all of the lies and the lying.
Even though there’s work to do, it’s easy now. As long as I maintain, I won’t be weighed down again. I never thought I would get the time to clean, but I made it by lowering the requirements. If I had tried to keep all of my things, I would still be dealing with the first pile or I’d have just given up.
The momentum from this one room has carried over to other areas of my life. Most of my house was in good shape, aside from this room, but the whole house had shrunk from this room being a complete waste. It had festered and become a sore on my home life.
My house is bigger now. I appreciate what I have… and what I don’t. I am more mindful of what I bring in and keep and why. The mess is decluttered and I’ve never felt better about throwing things out. I wanted to fly away from the mess, but the mess flew away from me.
Thank you TJ. You helped remind me of what matters.
Featured image by Eric Blandin from Pixabay