Donating books to your local library is an excellent solution if you are really anxious that you will miss them. It is very comforting to know that if you ever need them, you can borrow them back for a while. In the meantime they are being useful to others instead of clogging up your bookshelves and clogging up your life. The interesting thing about donating books to the local library is that people very rarely find they want to borrow them back. After letting them go, they move on to something new in their lives and forget all about those old tomes.
MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS, AND CLIPPINGS
In one house I visited there was a whole room full of airplane magazines that had been waiting over twenty years to be sorted so that the owner could discover which issues he was missing to complete the set. When I asked him what he would do when the collection was complete, he was dumbfounded. He had to think for a long time to remember why he wanted them. Collecting had become the goal, rather than using them for any purpose. When he gave himself permission to stop collecting and just let them go, he wrote to tell me what a huge relief it had been to take them to the local recycling center, and how wonderful it was to have an extra room in his house so that he could now invite guests to visit!
The study of another client had vanished under a sea of newspapers and magazines she was keeping until she had time to sort through them for articles. There were also three enormous piles of clippings next to her desk, awaiting further sorting and filing. When I suggested she could dump the lot and give herself a fresh start, there was a look of panic in her eyes, as if this could have life-threatening consequences! When we took a minute to look at this objectively together, it came down to her being genuinely afraid that she would inadvertently throw away some article that would prove to be vital to her existence. This is a variation on the “this-may-come-in-useful-one-day” syndrome, which is based in fear rather than in trusting life to bring you exactly what you need when you need it.
It is wonderful to want to keep learning all the days of your life. But we are bombarded today by so much information (see “Handling Information Overload” in chapter 21) that we need to be selective. If you want to keep clippings, create a filing system for them and keep it up-to-date. Sort them periodically and get rid of information that is no longer current. If you have a pile of clippings waiting to be filed, set yourself a reasonable time period (say, by the end of the month), and if they ain’t filed by then, file ’em in the recycling bin. When you have finished with your magazines, don’t hog them. Pass them on to hospitals, dentists, nursing homes, schools, and other public places where they can be used; give them to relatives, friends, or colleagues who will enjoy them; or just recycle them. But move them on.
I encouraged this woman to sit down and make a list of the many things she wanted to do in her life that she wasn’t allowing herself to do because of unfinished jobs such as this. This gave her a completely new perspective from which to review all the tasks she had set for herself, and it became an easy decision for her to keep just one recent pile of magazines and send the rest on their way. The next time I saw her, the change was remarkable. The grayish gloom that had hung around her had disappeared, even the bags under her eyes had all but vanished, and everything about her had become animated and alive. It seemed she had not stopped with newspaper clippings but had cleared her entire study of clutter, and then her entire house. She had totally revitalized her life.
SENTIMENTAL STUFF
This category of clutter includes wedding memorabilia, Christmas and birthday cards from years gone by, postcards, personal diaries from way back when, your children’s crayon masterpieces, and so on. The older you get, the more you have. You rarely look through any of it, but you like to know it is there.
My advice? Keep the best and fling the rest! Keep the things you really love, that have wonderful, fond associations. Let go of any items you are keeping out of a sense of guilt or obligation, have ambivalent feelings about, or just have too many of. Open the door to happy new experiences in your life rather than dwelling in the past.
One woman I met had drawers and drawers full of Christmas and birthday cards that had been sent to her, which she assured me had such sentimental value she could never part with them. But when we sat down and looked through them together, she became sadder and sadder, grieving for the happiness of times gone by. Making the decision to clear them out and start to build her social life afresh marked the beginning of her transformation from the lonely individual she had become to the socially outgoing person she longed to be.
If you have huge quantities of sentimental objects, the first pass is unlikely to be enough. You will probably need to refine the process even further by going through them again at a later date. It will be an ongoing process that may seem hard at first, but it does get easier every time you do it.
PHOTOS
Do you have drawers or albums stuffed full of photos? Enjoy your photos while they are current. Make colorful montages, put them on the wall, stick them on your notebooks, make postcards, and send them to your friends. Really get the most from them while their energy is fresh and new. Don’t keep photos that remind you of tough times in the past. Just keep the ones that make you feel good and let the rest go. Clear the space for something new and better in your life.
These days, many people don’t even print their photos. If you have a digital camera and store your images electronically, they take up no physical room at all. Energetically this is a huge improvement, but if this now means you have excessive quantities of disorganized images on the hard drive of your computer, you have a different problem to deal with. You’ll need software to help you catalog them, and then spend hours of your life doing so. It takes only a click of a button to take a photo, but a heck of a lot longer to index them so you can find them again when you want to.
If you’re a compulsive photo-snapper, discover why you do this. You may well be generating the type of clutter described in chapter 6 as “identity” clutter if you take photos so you can look at them years later and say to yourself, “I was there, I did that.” But if you did nothing useful while you were there, what is the point of cataloging it? It could just as easily be the case that you sit down at the end of your life, look through all your photos with a wiser eye, and ask yourself, “What was the point of going to all those places? I was too busy taking photos to really experience them and learn from being there!”
CLEAR YOUR DESK
If you have a desk at home or at work, this section is for you. The first step is to do one simple sum: calculate the percentage of naked desk you can actually see. Don’t cheat and tidy your desk before you do this. Just leave it exactly as it is to get an honest appraisal of your situation.
Now, I’ve seen hundreds of desks in my consultancy work, in both businesses and private homes, and one thing most of them have in common is that there is virtually no space where a person can work. Usually an area about the size of a piece of paper has been left free and everything else is occupied, either with equipment or with stacks of paper waiting for attention.
My advice: Clear Your Desk! There was once a wonderful book by Declan Treacy with just that title (sadly, it’s no longer in print), in which he described the desks and business practices of some of the top entrepreneurial businesspeople in the world, who all keep paperwork to a minimum. A clear desk means a clear mind, and a clear mind has vision and perspective. If you are bogged down in paperwork, that’s exactly where you’ll stay.
Working with a clear desk increases productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction. An excellent habit to acquire is to always leave your desk clear whenever you finish. It is psychologically far more uplifting to start with a clear desk than with mounds of paperwork, which makes you feel defeated before you even begin.
So start now by removing from your desk absolutely all paperwork that awaits your attention and all objects that are not absolutely vital. I’m talking
here about leaving only real essentials, such as a computer, telephone, pen, and notebook. Keep other extraneous equipment such as staplers, pens, paper clips, fluffy toys, and bags of munchies on a nearby shelf or in your desk drawer.
TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR PAPERWORK
Here are some tips to help you tame your personal paper tiger:
⬦ Get into the habit of ruthlessly reducing superfluous paperwork as much as you can.
⬦ Never jot down messages to yourself on loose pieces of paper. Keep them all in one book and periodically transfer important information to your filing system or computer.
⬦ Use your bulletin boards only for things that are current. If you want to remind yourself to do something, put it on your calendar. Sticky notes clutter your mind and make you more likely to forget to do things. Lots of reminder notes dissipate your energy.
⬦ Bring your financial paperwork up-to-date and keep it that way. You are far more likely to create prosperity in your life if you become more conscious about dealing with this aspect. Create systems for paying bills on time, file things where you can find them, and love the fact that every bill you receive means you are still credit worthy! When you learn to pay what you owe with as much joy as receiving what you’re due, you will have discovered how to enjoy this money game we humans have created for ourselves, rather than get stressed by it.
VIRTUAL CLUTTER
Virtual clutter on your computer can be just as much of a problem as the more tangible variety if you have limited storage capacity. Rather than waiting until your hard drive is full to start paring down documents you no longer need, a better way is to do a little every day. Go through your data files and delete old documents or transfer them to an archive system of some kind. Reorganize your filing system within your computer if necessary.
However, with data storage systems costing less and increasing exponentially in size with every passing year, this isn’t so necessary. My advice is to invest in a storage system that has all the capacity you require, and then develop your search engine skills so that you can find things when you need them. You’ll be happy to know that virtual clutter does not create the same kind of stagnant effect in your life as physical clutter, so providing you have computer skills and enough storage capacity, your hard drive is really only cluttered if you can’t instantly navigate your way around it. Invest some time in creating a filing and retrieval system that works and you can keep as many files as you want.
TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR EMAIL
With email addiction affecting a significant percentage of the population, here are two essential pieces of advice about how to tame it and prevent it from cluttering your workday:
⬦ Turn off any alert that tells you an email has just arrived in your inbox. The section about interruptions in chapter 17 explains why this is so important.
⬦ Never check your email first thing in the morning. I mean it. Unless your job relies on checking messages, they can be a huge distraction, leaving you at the end of the day feeling like you’ve dealt with them all, but achieved little else. I find my mornings are so productive and valuable that I don’t check email until I’ve completed the major task I’ve set for myself that day, which usually means not until the afternoon.
Clutter comes in all shapes and sizes. Here are some common items found lurking in many a home.
THINGS YOU NO LONGER USE
This is clutter created when life moves on and your belongings don’t. It includes:
⬦ Outdated leisure equipment (games no one ever liked, sports no one plays anymore, hobbies you have no interest in now, toys your children have long since outgrown, and so on)
⬦ Audio equipment you’ll never use again (such as speakers to a sound system you no longer own, amplifiers that hiss and growl)
⬦ Fitness equipment you conscientiously purchased and never used after the initial inspiration wore off (apparatuses for tummy-flattening, thigh-trimming, muscle-building, and so on)
⬦ Health and beauty equipment that’s had its day (hair stylers, foot massagers)
⬦ Gadgets purchased to make life easier that proved too much trouble to use
⬦ Aging garden equipment (rusting lawnmowers, scruffy garden furniture, statues with missing limbs)
⬦ Car accessories you no longer use (roof racks, tires, assorted spare parts)
And on and on. I can’t even begin to cover the list of strange and curious items people have around their properties that they haven’t used in ages and will never use again. You can have a good chuckle to yourself as you come across some of your own.
If you have particularly fond attachments to things you no longer use that date back to your tender childhood years, here’s something you can do that many people find very satisfactory and liberating: photograph them for posterity and then let them go. The photos will retain those heartwarming memories forever and can be stored in a fraction of the space the items themselves take up. Or better still, store them digitally on your computer in a “happy memories” folder.
UNWANTED GIFTS
This can be a very sensitive issue for some people. However, here’s my very best advice on what to do with unwanted gifts: GET RID OF THEM.
Here’s why. Things you really love have a strong, vibrant energy field around them, whereas unwanted items impart uneasy, conflicting energies that drain rather than energize you. They actually create an energetic gloom in your home.
The very thought of letting them go is horrifying to some people. “But what about when Aunt Jane comes to visit and that expensive item she gave us isn’t on the table?” Whose table is it anyway? If you love the item, fine, but if you keep it in your home out of fear and obligation, you are giving your power away. Every time you walk into the room and see it, your energy levels drop.
And don’t think “out of sight, out of mind” will work. You can’t keep something in the cabinet and just bring it out when Aunt Jane is due to visit. Your subconscious mind still knows it’s on the premises. If you have enough of these unwanted gifts around you, your energy network looks like a sieve, with vitality running out all over the place.
Remember, it’s the thought that counts. You can appreciate being given a gift without necessarily having to keep it. Try adopting a whole new philosophy: when you give something to someone, give it with love and let it go. Allow the recipient complete freedom to do whatever they want with it. If the most useful thing they can do is put it straight in the trash or give it to someone else, fine (you wouldn’t want them to clutter up their space with unwanted gifts, would you?). Give others this freedom and you will begin to experience more freedom in your own life, too.
THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE
These are things you bought yourself, but have never really liked since the day you got them. Usually you are keeping them until you have the time or money to buy something better.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve never liked ironing very much. I had a perfectly good, average kind of iron but I was never inspired to use it. I went to great lengths to make sure I hardly ever wore anything that needed ironing. Then one day, while staying at a friend’s house, I discovered what I can only describe as “the empress of irons.” True, it cost twice as much as the run-of-the-mill item I had at home, but what a joy to use. It took ironing to a whole new level I never knew existed. When I got home I went straight out and bought one, then spent a whole afternoon contentedly ironing my way through all my clothes. For the first time in my life I experienced this activity as a pleasure.
Don’t put up with giving yourself second best. When you nourish yourself by giving yourself the best you can, that signal goes out and will attract the best in other areas of your life, too. If you are struggling financially and just “getting by” with most of the things you own, love them, be grateful for what you have, and intend to soon create the
resources to replace them with things that inspire you more. Most people are surprised how quickly this becomes possible once they set their intention to do it.
THINGS THAT NEED FIXING
Things that need fixing are an energy drain. This is because everything you own comes under the mantle of your care and protection. You may conveniently put off doing anything about it, but your subconscious mind keeps track of these things, and every time you see the object or one that reminds you of it, your energy drops.
Suppose you have a chair with a wobbly leg. You have long since tuned out consciously seeing it when you walk into the room, but your eyes do still see it, your subconscious mind does still register it, and your body never fails to react energetically. When you promise yourself you will repair something and then don’t, you lose even more energy and vitality from your body.
One woman I know lives in a big house where just about everything in it needs fixing in some way. She does admittedly live on a low income and has a child to support, but she is a resourceful, capable woman who could fix things if she wanted to. The lack of care and respect that she has for her home reflects the lack of care and respect she has for herself. When you care for your home by looking after it, you are loving and respecting yourself.
Think of repairing and improving things in your home as an investment in yourself. And if there is something you can’t be bothered to fix, then find it a new home with someone who would like it and is willing to repair it, or get rid of it in some other way.
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated) Page 7
