Clarity from Decluttering

The last couple of months I've been decluttering my home and office. It sounds like an awful long time but I've accumulated an awful lot of junk from the last few years. I still had boxes of paperwork from the time I shared a house with Jozef and ex-Black Mermaid Productions business partner Bruce – and I had moved out 13 years ago! That's ridiculous! Anyway, I've been sorting, filing, archiving, cleaning, donating and chucking. I'm about 65% there but have such a heavy work schedule at the moment that I need to keep doing it one box or basket at a time until such time that it's all finished.

About a month ago I bought a shelving storage unit for my office. It was reasonably priced at $228.00 from OfficeWorks and it took about three hours to put together (thanks, Paps!). All my filing trays are now off the floor and organised according to colour – Black Mermaid (black trays) and my own work (pink trays). All the receipts, computer cords, business cards, paper (recycled for drafts and new paper for final copies) and all my beloved ornaments and toys have a place now including the I Dream of Jeannie cookie jar with a miniature Jeannie inside which my sister and I gave to our grandmother (Babushka) for Xmas many years ago. After my Babushka died the cookie jar returned to me. It has great sentimental value.

The act of decluttering has had psychological benefits as well. I've felt a huge energy shift inside me. The only way I can describe it is prior to decluttering I felt like much of my energy was leaking out of me like water leaking out of holes in a dam wall. Once I started cleaning, some of those holes miraculously plugged themselves up and I was suddenly able to access that energy again to complete many of my other jobs. The result – clarity, peace of mind, productivity, and enormous focus accompanied by a lightness of spirit.

In the past I tended to gravitate towards two extremes – being either ultra obsessively organised or exceptionally messy – although strangely enough all the interiors of my cupboards and desks were always clean and tidy. When I was really busy and stressed I would just throw things onto piles on the floor after I have finished using them rather than return these objects to their proper homes (I think I was reverting to 5-year-old behaviour!). Now what's happening is that I am conscientiously putting things back into their allocated place. The receipts I need to sort, record and file are put in a manilla folder in one of the trays. The bills go into another tray until such time during each week that I work on finances. I'm putting books back in their rightful spots and my story notebooks, diary/day planner and seminar notes all have their place.

Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer who co-wrote The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, which I consider to be the definitive self-motivational book about orienting and creating the present/future you want for yourself, talk about "Cleaning Up Your Messes and Your Incompletes" in Chapter 28. They advocate getting into "Completion Consciousness" because failing to do so robs you of valuable attention units. Furthermore, the book discussions the four D's of completion – Do it, Delegate it, Delay it, or Dump it! It basically all comes down to this – "If there's anything new that you want in your life, you've got to make room for it" – psychologically and physically.

I've felt huge shifts inside me since I started and am determined now to get to the end. If I'm experiencing lightness at this point of time when I'm only two-thirds there, imagine what I'll feel like when I finish this job and hold my arms out to embrace and receive the good things that are coming into my life – the publication of Elf~Fin being one of them.