What do you think your clutter is telling you? Is it constantly reminding you of all the things you wanted to do…at a different phase of your life?

Often our clutter is reminding us of the empty promises, or unfinished, or unfulfilled commitments we have made to ourselves over the years. It is so heavy to walk through room after room of good intentions but actually excuses for incomplete work. Maybe you had a goal of making curtains – so you have the stuff to do it but haven’t done it…still. Maybe you have a great kitchen gadget that you were so excited to use…but still haven’t had a chance to take it out of the package. Maybe it’s fitness equipment, I mean it keeps you healthy right? Not while you’re tripping over it to get to something else. Maybe it’s simpler day to day stuff, like leaving a dirty dish in the sink, and you tell yourself you’ll wash it later.

All of this stuff stays in your way as clutter! It’s not helping you with your life! It surely can’t be making you feel good and proud of yourself.

It’s all weighing you down. It’s haunting you!

It’s not adding joy and fun to your life, it’s reminding you of your to do list, or wish list of things you WANT to do…or WANTED to do at some point in your life. We go through so many phases of life, and each one serves its purposes. The goals or activities I did to fill time were way different when I was young and single, than when I was pregnant or a new mom, than in the future as a mom of adult kids! Life changes, there’s no need to hold on to the stuff that fulfilled each of those phases!

If you have a lot of clutter and want to sort through it and declutter your life, spend some time assessing your values and goals in regard to your interests now! Maybe there is a reason a project is half finished, maybe your goals changed during the project. Or maybe you just didn’t get as much fun out of it as you previously thought. Give yourself permission to get rid of something – even if at one point it was all you wanted.

Lift the burden!

Do yourself a favour…remind yourself that those goals or projects, are promises from the past. They don’t have anything to do with the now! If the project was a goal to be completed years ago, do you still have the same goal or desire now? Are you holding onto it just because it was something you started, and now you think you need to finish it? Do you really want to do it now, at all? Just because you started something, doesn’t really mean you need to finish it. Sometimes, those hobby projects are more about passing time and less about a true start to finish. If you have things around that just make you feel like it’s another chore to add to your list, why keep it? If you really can’t bring yourself to get rid of it in a basic sense, use it to teach someone else how to do the project, create little kits out of your stuff or donate it in its half-finished state. Who knows, maybe someone needs a few pieces from it in order to finish their own project. There is nothing forcing you to hang on to those half-finished projects, or even to the raw material if you haven’t started the project yet. Just because you used to want to do it, doesn’t mean you should hold yourself prisoner to do it still, one day!

Things change, you change!

Most of the time, when I walk by something that I know I wanted to do years ago, I make an excuse to myself for why it’s not done yet, or why I never got to it. But that adds stress and pressure and makes me feel like I let myself down or let someone else down if it was something for someone else. It’s ok that I didn’t get to it then, life changed, or my goals changed, or maybe the materials changed. I can’t change the past, but I can decide how I want this stuff to affect my life now.

If your clutter speaks to you this way…as in adding those negative feelings…then let it go. Life is too short to feel like your stuff is holding you back!

Thanks for coming home!