empty house = empty mind

Michael Scott: Today is Spring cleaning day here at Dundler Mifflin, and yes I know it's January, I'm not an idiot, but if you do your Spring cleaning in January guess what you don't have to do in the Spring... anything. They say a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, well I say an empty desk means an...
Dwight Schrute: Empty mind.
Michael Scott: Well, no... that's not what I was going to say.
The Office Season 2: The Secret

We are huge Office fans here at the Blad Pad and that particular exchange between Michael and Dwight came to mind as I prepared for our garage sale last week. Of course it is much funnier when you are actually watching the show, but as I cleared my house of all things unwanted or un-needed, my house started to feel a little emptier. . . which got me asking myself, does it make my mind a little emptier?

I have to say YES.

A long, long time ago I read an article in Real Simple about a life coach helping a woman combat her anxiety. The gist of the article was that as part of her therapy she had to remove 100 items from her house and each item had to be a different thing. She could have recycled 100 old magazines or donated 100 books, but that would have only counted as 1 actual item. At first the woman thought of the project as daunting and impossible, but the more she got rid of, the easier it became and the freer she felt. In this case it truly was an empty house = an empty mind. . . or at least a mind empty of anxiety.

I definitely felt a sense of relief detoxing the house of things we don't need or use anymore. There is freedom in the things you own not owning you. That isn’t to say I don’t value *anything* because I do. For every 100 items I could get rid of, there are 100 items I would be heartbroken to lose. That being said, I learned a lot from my first garage sale experience. I learned they are a lot more work then I would have ever thought. I learned that the work doesn’t end when the garage sale ends. I learned to surround myself with the things I love and get rid of the rest. I learned less is more. I learned that a cluttered house makes for a cluttered mind.



And now my mind feels just a little less cluttered.