Things sneak into the closets of my mind …

Your house is your home only when you feel you have jurisdiction over the space. Joan Kron

Every year I am challenged to declutter and this year is no exception, and I have found that one of the best ways to avoid doing and to just talk about doing, is to do online research on the topic, and thus further avoid doing.

January is a busy month for donations at the second hand clothing store where I spend Tues afternoons. People are cleaning out closets. Out with the old and in with the new … and this is the time of year to question why I hang on to some unused items. (But I paid good money for it—and I know I might need it, someday.) While discussing with a friend about the stuff that collects so quickly, she hauled out Peter Walsh’s book, which I interpreted as a divine sign. (Note to self—she is organized and can find items immediately.) And No the clutter does not make my butt look fat, but it does make me feel heavy in spirit. While I have accepted that I will never be a Good Housekeeping poster child, a cluttered space carries a feeling of chaos, and  I prefer a sense of calm in my home. And my calm is disrupted by my clutter. When I have trouble finding things, I know it’s time to re-organize. Most of my friends maintain their homes well, but I am acquainted with a range of house keeping habits, from one that vacuums three times a day, to a spinster librarian, with cats and cat food dishes located in bulk around her small house, to a dining room table that has not seen food for years, because it is covered with stuff. Twenty-one is the number of Srabble games she owns—just in case the church might ever hold a scrabble tournament. (Does no one else own scrabble?) Everyone of us has our own reason for clinging to unneeded items, and lately my reasoning has come into question.

MIT finds a correlation between smarts and messiness, but it’s MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the writer went on to suggest messy-desked people might be skewing the results in their favour. Anyways, they say that “Messiness is often associated with artistic, creative and scientific or mathematical genius, spontaneity, but also with carelessness, eccentricity, madness and unreliability.”

Cleanliness was next to Godliness in my childhood days … my sisters and I rushed through the Saturday morning chores so we could watch Dick Clark’s American Bandstand at noon. An automatic association for me is to clean and then celebrate with dance, not unlike a Guy Davis blues song —his line goes,  had some old shoes on, got new shoes now, and I feel like dancing …. thinking old thoughts, got some new thoughts now, and I feel like dancing … Yes, decluttering the closet and the mind leads to dancing and an increased mood of feel good.

An immaculate home (or conception) has never been part of my story, but the closets have become slightly more organized and I feel like dancing.