Transition.

I had a thought recently.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been decluttering my space with a little help from the Making Space For Your Goddess To Shine decluttering course.

I’m currently off work with depression and part of that, for me, right now, is that I’m staying at my parents’ house instead of at home. I only moved out a couple of years ago, and I still have a room here, and it’s still loaded with my stuff. And rooms that I have charge of have a bit of a tendency to turn into rubbish tips. My belongings get thrown all over the floor, dirty and clean clothes together, paper, junk, rubbish I haven’t managed to throw away, and so on. Plus there are a load of boxes from an attempted tidying project a few years ago, which essentially boiled down to me saying “fuck it” and throwing a lot of junk, unsorted, into boxes on the premise that I would “sort them out later”. Until now, I never have.

Well; I’m doing it now. And because one of the premises of Goddess Decluttering is that decluttering and organizing are two different things (revelation! Thanks Lisa!) I’m focusing only on decluttering. The question is: “Do I want to keep this or not?” If so, it goes into a “keep for now” box (I’m anticipating doing a few rounds of this), and if not, it goes in the rubbish, the recycling, or a bag for the charity shop.

As if by magic, the junk on the floor is much reduced. I have carpet – who knew?!

I even did some miniature cleaning. I don’t do cleaning – ugh ugh ugh – so this is definitely a Big Thing recently.

And I had my thought.

My thought.

It doesn’t look like a rubbish tip any more.

It looks like I’m in transition.

Like maybe I’m finally moving out for real.

There’s things in boxes and bags. There’s a black sack for rubbish. There are still things on the floor but they’re being processed – not just lying there being trodden on. And that’s a big thing. Processing is happening. And I had another thought: that maybe the processing is as important as the result. The – oh, this sounds pretty silly, but the process of processing is as important as the feeling of accomplishment I get when looking at my recently-revealed carpet.

It’s all about the journey.

Oh, hi there, Havi. That’d be one of your major concepts, wouldn’t it?

My mother asked me recently if my room was now perfectly tidy and sorted out. I had to say no. And I realized, somewhere in the process of thinking about why that question bothered me – that maybe it will never be done.

And maybe that’s okay.

Because it’s not about getting there. It’s about – about getting somewhere – about being able to look back and say that where you are now is somewhere different from the place you were before. That you’re moving. And that the moving is good. Even a few weeks ago, the phrase “it will never be done” would have been terrifying to me. It would have freaked me the fuck out. Because the idea that you don’t have a destination and that everything isn’t about getting to that place, but maybe it’s about just not being where you were before that was making you miserable… yeah, that’s still not a totally comfortable idea.

I still think about my room at home, which is at the very beginning of the decluttering process, and freak out that it will never be done. But maybe I’m freaking out that it will never not be like it is now. I want to make it into a sanctuary, somewhere I can rest, rather than somewhere where I just look at the mess and think, “Oh my God”. And it seems like I’ll never get there. It’s just now occurring to me – yay live processing! – that maybe the journey itself will make a difference. That even with my room at home, it’ll be the process of untangling that makes me feel better, not the state of being 100% untangled.

‘Cause who’s ever completely untangled, right?

Ritual.

I have a little “decluttering ritual” that helps me.

It’s pretty short and simple. I just light the candle on my altar, then get on with it. One small pile, or one box, at a time. Distribute stuff between the rubbish bag, the recycling and the pile of stuff for the charity shop. Slowly process my stuff.

What I’m going to do next, I don’t know. I’lll get Week Four of my decluttering course today, and I have hope that it’ll start to talk me through starting to organize some of the stuff that I’ve decided to keep. Of course, I’m doubly complex, because I’ve got two places to store stuff, and I have to decide what should be where. But it’s okay. It’ll all come right in the end. It’s the journey that’s important, not the destination.

Although – I still care a little bit about the destination – because without one, I could end up wandering forever in circles or even going backwards.

Maybe it’s about moving in the right direction.

Maybe we’re always in transition. Maybe that’s part of the human condition. Maybe change really is the only constant.

And maybe that’s not the terrifying thing that I have always thought.

Tagged as: declutter goddesses, ramblings from my head, stalking Havi Brooks, things that help