Make a decision. Change your life.
This week a friend said something to me that was meant to be a me a compliment but that didn’t really sit well with me. This wasn’t a backhanded compliment – she was well-intentioned. It just got me thinking about my intentions. She said that I’m an expert at helping people compartmentalize their lives – essentially separating things and putting them in order so they make sense.
So she was surprised I couldn’t compartmentalize my projects the way I seemed to with people’s space. What brought this on is that I had just told her I was greatly relieved after dropping a personal project and had felt I needed to
Decisions. Image by robleto via Flickr
do so in order to regain my balance and focus.
It was a hard decision but a good one, I was again feeling the flow. But it got me thinking, why wasn’t I able to separate the personal and professional this time? Why wasn’t it fitting?
Here’s why. It isn’t about separating things to fit them in – it is about making them all flow together. Our lives are not compartments, they flow into each other and if something isn’t fitting in then there is clutter, a stopping up, and nothing can flow – all production shuts down because of the excess. Then you have to sit down and access what part is the excess, what part don’t I need, want or love? (Or just doesn’t fit right now…this client? that Spanish class?)
I don’t see my work with clients as helping them to separate their things and lives into compartments. I see it as quite the opposite. I want to work with people to focus in on the essence, the core of what it is that they really, truly love and love to do. What makes their lives and businesses flow both in a literal, spacial sense and in a philosophical sense. Because there isn’t much of a difference. Then we get rid of the rest. Anything you don’t love is clutter in your space. Anything you don’t love to do is cluttering up your schedule and your energy.
As a professional organizer I see getting rid of clutter as bringing in a wholeness and engaging a flow into a space, a business, a life. Not really as separating things out and saying – this part of me is over there – that part of me is over here and ne’er the twain shall meet. That is a difficult way to live.
Making decisions is the core of what organization is all about. But it is what makes the biggest changes. It is about making a stand. It says to you and to the rest of the world, “This is what I stand for. This is what is important. This is what I believe.”
If every single thing you own is something you have taken a bit of time to consider, to decide, in terms of its usefulness and its beauty then you will bring this kind of consideration to bare in other areas of your life too. Relationships (of all kinds) will blossom, money flows in (because it thrives on this kind of respect), and your energy rises (finally). That is the flow.
Yes…the pens belong in the pen holder, and the spoons with the spoons…and there is a kind of poetic flow in that kind of separateness – all together under the same roof.
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