SIMPLIFY. ORGANIZE. MANAGE RESOURCES WISELY.

It's been a "one thing leads to another" sort of thing the past couple of years. I have worked in health and human services my entire career, and been involved in lay ministry, so had never heard of organizing, not as a profession. One of my work colleague's wife was a professional organizer with her own company, so I heard of that... then while in the process of checking on job postings (on behalf of my husband who was forced into early retirement four years ago), I saw her post an apprenticeship. Timing was not right for me then and I didn't know enough about the field, started to read about it, look into it, and linked to sites on simplifying, organizing, managing resources wisely, creativity, and productively. And found that interesting as well. 

In my field "productivity" can be a threatening thing, a pressure to keep interactions with clients to a specified minimum length of time, treatments are defined in minutes, but some definitions of productivity are quite different. It appears to be about maximizing our personal and organizational time, talent, and treasure... to keep things simple and manage our resources wisely. My life is all about that, as my husband and I deal with our mid-life transitions. And that, in a nutshell, is my current interest in professional organizing and productivity!

DE-CLUTTERING + ORGANIZING = PURGING

Thought I’d get your attention!

You know it isn’t just us (you, me, maybe a couple others), but as a society, including within secular circles, among folks who have little spiritual insight nor “feeling”. In the world, those who have given it thought tend to believe it has to do with the over- muchness of our material life, which is non-sustainable, as well as unjust to most who live on this earth. In other words, it’s not right that so few have so much, and we can’t keep doing this anyway, our resources are running out.

For those who may have spiritual inclinations, Christian or otherwise, the sense is that our “stuff’ has not just cluttered our physical living and working spaces, but have cluttered our hearts and souls as well. An increasing chaos which increases stress, just by having it around, this is not good for our body-mind-spirit, individually nor collectively.

For Christians, I think it’s “same old same old”, in that there has always been a tension between ascetism (think hermits and some orders of religious brothers and sisters, think of Saint Francis of Assisi who on his conversion went to the Vatican and appeared to the Pope of that time naked) and the prosperity gospel thing (God loves us so wants us to have have have…). Not too many of us have it figured out.

For my husband and me, it’s been interesting. I cannot imagine all the stuff that continues to come out of his closet--- “old records”--- of every description, that he is now heaving. HOW and WHY he kept it all, other than his accountant mindset, and HOW and WHY we had to move it all….. is absolutely beyond me.

As for me, it took way too long to get through all of my mother’s things which were in the storage unit. The first year after she died I could not do it at all. After which I could do it in nanoseconds, gradually working up to minutes and finally to as much as a half hour. Jack was very helpful and very patient with me. (Just for the record, now that it’s gone I had a burst of anger at my brother, who left all her care and all her things for me to deal with, without any assistance from him. But we digress. And that anger went rather quickly. I think. Because I realize, deep down, he just CAN’T). And now that it IS done and it IS gone, such a sense of freedom!

All our stuff is now where we live! Cars are empty of stuff. And each closet, each drawer, each cabinet is getting pared down. To the essentials. And even more, clothing may be essential, but if it hasn’t been used, or no longer fits--- no matter how we may wish to think it may again--- going to be used by someone else. If it exists it needs to be useful. If not to me or to us, then to someone else.