A cluttered mind is like the mind of a prisoner looking through barbed wire at the most meaningful things in life, like love, creativity, and fun, and not feeling able to reach them because the prisoner feels he or she has to take care of the clutter first. The clutter could be either mental or environmental.
I feel like that prisoner with the accumulation of papers and things over decades in a small apartment when I was busy working and commuting a four-bus round trip, while pursuing meaningful activities like church, peace activism, travel, and writing groups. I would be too tired or unwise to cope with things and acted as if I didn’t know how sneaky paper could be.
A cluttered mind can develop for both external and internal reasons, which can feed on each other. It can come through one’s mood or through the accumulation of objects that scream, “Save me, you’ll read me or need me later!” Or, “Fix me!” Or, “File me!” Or, ”Organize me!” Or, “Collect me!” Or, “Answer me!”
One of the easiest ways to get clutter, if you like magazines, is to pledge to WGBH or WBUR. They will offer you magazines, which are so tempting to the curious and print-addicted. I received Time and the New Yorker from them. I plan to let Real Simple expire as I did Cook’s Illustrated and the Atlantic Monthly. If I didn’t have a lifetime of paper to organize and clear, I could feel free to read the New Yorker. I gave up the daily Boston Globe and kept the Sunday Globe. Even that is hard to keep up with.
In connection with periodicals, I must mention clippings. Curiosity is a healthy trait, but clippings can be devilish. They ask to be read and filed if you want to keep them. They tempt your curiosity and sense of meaning so that it is hard to throw them out. There can be more clippings than you can read. The subjects can range from recipes to living alone to centenarian graduating from high school to avoiding certain diseases to relations between Russia and the United States to the latest critique of “Downton Abbey” to political cartoons, etc., etc.
I am also disturbed by the thought of having to give away some of my books. I have too many double shelved bookcases and books piled on my floor. It is annoying to look for something like a misfiled memory. It is necessary to always have enough space for filing, like enough bookcases for books.
It is depressing to come home from a vacation, or a dinner with friends or a walk in a park or garden, and to be hit in the face with clutter when you open your door. Please notice the peaceful scenes in the paintings by Sylvia Gilman hanging on the walls. If I walked out of one of Sylvia’s paintings into my apartment, I might feel depressed.
Another problem with a cluttered mind is that it can keep you awake at night if you worry that you will never lose that nagging feeling that you won’t clear your clutter up enough to have love, creativity, and fun in your life as fully as possible. I long for an automatically organized life so I can trap things before they trap me.
I dread leaving my clutter behind because relatives might throw out my writings or the small tangible traces of me. I’d like to separate family pictures, letters, books about relatives, and my writings from files and piles of things like magazines and clippings that might not interest my relatives.
Sometimes I wish I had a therapist or was dating a man who was a reformed packrat who understood how much my identity was expressed in an amorphous pile of papers or a multitude of books or why I wanted to remember the names of people who gave me good memories even those far in the past.
I have a clutter coach. I am not afraid of going over old clothes with her, but when she says a paper is old, I have to tell her it is the content that counts. I am afraid of throwing out meaningful paper although there is a lot of paper I am glad we have gotten rid of.
I look forward to the time when my clutter is gone or under control, and I can feel much freer to invite guests, read magazines when they arrive, write, lie down and listen to music, call friends, go to a movie, do peace activities, and still enjoy the Museum of Fine Arts, WomenExplore, church, my book club, and my writing group. I’d still have to wash dishes, but everyone does that.
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