At one point in my life, I changed apartments 9 times in 10 years. That was also over a span of 5 countries. Such an easy way to be adventurous, simply pack up and move.
Then I landed in the fertile grounds of Austin. It’s easy to assume that with age and maturity, that I settled down. In actuality, I’m still adventurous. I just don’t have to pack up everything. There are pros and cons to both approaches to adventure.
When I was on the move, nothing made the cut that wasn’t used within that past year. Yet, staying in the same place for nearly a decade allows for things to get squirreled away, and covered with dust bunnies.
There are pockets of past projects and hobbies tucked away in closets and drawers. Books filling the bowels of my bookcase that I’ve no intention of rereading. T-shirts fighting for space in my drawer.
Every weekend in the month of July, I’m dropping off some no longer useful things at my local Goodwill before continuing to my Sunday midday yoga class. I cleanse everything else, why not my apartment?
The energy changes when there are no longer dead zones of clutter. The last time I had such a serious decluttering occurred a couple of years ago when I moved my desk and bed around in order to create a home office. The thick carpet of dust blanketing everything that I’d shoved under my bed disgusted me. From that point on, once my bed was in its new location, I never put anything underneath it again.
Yet, this next apartment cleanse has been long overdue. Some of the possessions no longer even reflect the life I currently lead. I still had my mini-fridge and microwave that used to be in my classroom from 6 years ago. Then I had far more smooth pressed cardboard from cereal and soap boxes than I ever remember consuming from an era long ago when my plan was to practice painting on them.
I laughed when I saw the almost new looking flower pot with a half bag of cactus soil in it from the time I was growing a moringa plant. Some call such plants the new miracle food. The only miracle I witnessed was how I managed to kill it in a short space of time. I gave the pot and soil to a green thumb friend.
I’d love to say that from now on, I’ll do an annual “Spring Cleaning,” but I don’t want to get into the habit of lying to myself. What I’ve done in the past is tidy up a small area at a time. That’s spared me from being a straight-up hoarder. Yet the accumulation of 9 years worth of spot tidying has finally caught up with me. The least I can do is have my current possessions reflect who I presently am. All the other things need to be donated, recycled or thrown away.
Even though Nature abhors a vacuum and works against the organization of things, I feel very empowered to organize and cleanse my immediate surrounds that I influence.