Decluttering

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. ~Eckhart Tolle

I'm ready to clear away the clutter in my life, both the physical clutter and mental clutter. My desk has been piled with books and useless papers for too long, and I am finally going to go through it all. Today. The desk is just one of the surfaces in the house where it is so easy to let things accumulate. I can be a tidy person when I actually keep up with it, but once I start to let it go, it just goes.

This is the physical manifestation of how I felt during school this summer. I had to keep up the appearance of having my stuff together despite the fact that things were out of control. This summer was pretty trying with having to go home to Maryland and help my mom deal with things in the face of my father's abandonment. Things were out of control, but I still managed to keep it together enough to get A's in my classes.

I've felt pretty cluttered emotionally, too. The situation with my father has been a grieving process that I am sure will continue to surface at times. I have had a few dreams lately that I've woken up from in tears. This is normal, I know, and I have tried to embrace what I am feeling at the time. Bringing my attention to the emotions that surface actually causes them to subside. This makes me less emotional in the long run. Fighting the emotions only makes me feel worse.

I am really trying to make an effort to be present, which is difficult at times. But I know that when I manage it, I feel whole and complete. Eckhart Tolle says that "life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness." It is not beneficial for me to look at myself as a victim. There is a reason that this has happened and it is for the betterment of my own evolution and what I bring into the world. Sometimes it seems so much easier to wake up and be angry, hurt, and frustrated. But those are the days when I feel at my worst, when my ego is constantly in my head, having imaginary conversations that don't get me anywhere.

Tolle also says, "If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in." On the days where I allow myself to become victim, I completely close the shutters, and I am alone in a dark room. I think we all can relate to those days where we've wallowed in our own darkness, sometimes just for the useless sake of wallowing.

My surfaces inside and outside need some serious purging and arranging. I've used the clutter in my outside world to put off dealing with the internal clutter for too long, and that's about to change. I am going to start on the outside, where it's easiest. Then I am going to go deep and get through the emotional gunk so that my inside is clean and shiny and where I need it to be.