# 283: Cleaning Up
Story behind the Passage
My small car accident last week was a wake-up call. It told me that I should be paying attention to something again — something crucial. Whenever these wake-up calls happen, we do not know what exactly they want to draw our attention to, right? Our challenge is to find out about it. And the one thing that usually applies to my wake-up calls is: they tell me that my life is too messy. Yes, I am a creative person and people like us are often said to be more messy — chaotic — than others. Still, there are limits. My limit is where accidents and other things start happening. They remind me that I need to do one thing exactly: Clean up —
My life
My stuff
My people
Yes, you are reading correctly. I am also talking about people here because people are connected to things as you will read below. But it does not have to be that way, of course. Sometimes people come without many things and they still mess up your life. They do not even have to do anything in particular. Their simple presence in your life turns them into a burden. Burdens are heavy and cost you energy that messes up your otherwise healthy energy balance.
In my present situation, there is too much of everything.
The point is, there is improvement in the long run. What I am saying is this: If I think back, with every cleaning-up mission, it becomes less baggage in many different ways. Still, it is quite noticeable how much stuff does find its way back to your life somehow, even though you thought, you had already gotten rid of it. Of course, the simple fact that it can come back is a sign that you never really threw it out or even destroyed it. You most likely just put it somewhere else and covered it well enough so you were not aware of it anymore. Still, it has remained there all the time. This is the thing that will smack you in the face at a certain point.
My Learnings
“Wenn Sie von mehr Dingen umgeben sind, als sie bewältigen können, wird Ihnen unterschwellig ein Gefühl von Schwäche vermittelt.“ / “If you are surrounded by more things than you can handle, you subliminally get a feeling of weakness.“ This is so true, I can hardly believe how true it is. But you also keep cheating yourself. You think that you need all the stuff around you. And I am not talking about “physical” neediness in the way that you need a screwdriver or a replacement light bulb. I mean the psychological needs triggered by this voice in your head. It tells you all the time “I need this piece of clothing or that picture in the corner and this memory of person x.”
No, you do not!
But since you are telling yourself this story, you are making yourself feel weak because of the dependency that goes along with this. Whatever you believe about certain things surrounding you will make you believe that you cannot live without them. In other words, you are becoming the slave of your things — the people attached to them — and their stories. That is so much more than they actually deserve and since you very well know all this, you are making yourself even smaller. It is stupid to be falling into this trap but you do it — and you do it consciously in a way. That needs to stop, especially because there is no bright future otherwise.
And when I write “you,”
I mean myself,
of course.
“Gerümpel bremst Ihre Entwicklung denn oft sind die abgelagerten Dinge mit Erinnerungen verbunden und halten Sie so in der Vergangenheit fest.“ / “Junk slows down your development because very often, these deposited things are connected to memories which thus keep you in the past.” Boy, this is so true but it is the hardest thing to let go off. After all, there are days when you actually have nothing else but memories of a certain time period in your life and of certain people. Still, I know that this is exactly the destructive mode. Your memories will not go away because you throw away a certain item. Neither can you consciously erase memories. They will remain, no worries. If you are meant to remember in the future, you will.
But if you do not let go of all the junk surrounding you,
There will be no future,
At least no bright and liberated one.
Is that what everybody wants?
No, not everyone.
But I want it.
More than I want my fear to win over me.
Reflection Questions
1) When did you last throw out all junk in your home? How did you feel afterwards?
2) Do you ever read self-help guides like “Simplify Your Life”? Why/not?
3) Do you believe that your immediate surroundings, even your furniture, have an effect on your creativity or productivity? How exactly?