How Spring Cleaning can Bring us Peace
Photo from Unsplash
“Having a simplified, uncluttered home is a form of self-care.”
~ Emma Scheib
I don’t know about you guys, but my house needs some serious spring cleaning. So rather than digging in on that task, I’m writing about it instead.
My favorite stalling tactic!
How about you? Are you feeling the urge to open the windows and shake out the rugs? Or did you jump on the Marie Kondo bandwagon during the pandemic, and throw all your anxious energy into organizing your spaces?
Not me. I was busy making banana bread.
Did you know that the concept of spring cleaning is linked historically to many different religious and cultural traditions? I didn’t. Check out this interesting post about it: A Clean House Means Peace of Mind.
In theory, I embrace the process of decluttering, letting things go, and developing a system for storing my belongings. I’ve watched enough reveals on HGTV to have learned how to do it through osmosis. The designers know just how much “stuff” looks good in a room, and no more.
My realtor told me that one of the reasons people love touring new homes is because they don’t have much in them. As we accumulate, we don’t discard enough, so over time most of us tend to overload our spaces. I promised myself when we moved to our current house I would do better, especially since it has so many closets. I did okay for the first few years, but I’ve been slipping. It’s just that I find organizing so tedious.
It’s a Steven-Covey-type “sharpen the saw” activity, one that we have to make ourselves stop and do, but the results can be so gratifying. Cleaning actually has health benefits, too.
On those rare occasions when I do take the time to declutter, I feel incredibly free and happy afterwards. According to a recent Daily OM post, “Our living spaces can become nurturing homes for our bodies and souls when we make sure that our surroundings accurately reflect who we are as individuals.”
The aesthetic of our homes really does affect our moods.
I seriously wish I were the kind of girl to have “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” That said, in my experience, it’s a rare writer who keeps that kind of home. We tend to live more in our heads than we do in the real world. Just for fun, some of my fellow writers shared photos of their offices in our forum and, let’s just say, we look like a bunch of absent-minded professors.
In my defense, growing up in a home with ten people, clutter was the norm. My mom was a creative as well, and would much rather sew than clean. I honestly didn’t know about the existence of anything other than paper and plastic bags and shoeboxes for storage for most of my adulthood. The first time I went to The Container Store, I was overwhelmed at the variety of storage solutions.
Determined to learn more about the process of decluttering, I finally checked out Marie Kondo’s website. For starters, I love her job title: Tidying Expert. Too intimidated to look at her line of products on her Home page, I jumped to her About page where she explains her “6 Rules of Tidying.”
Rule #1: Commit Yourself to Tidying Up
“Setting the intention to seriously tidy up – and resolving to put in the time and effort required – is the first rule of tidying.”
Hmmm, I think I see where my problem lies…
But I’m all about growth, so I when my daughter told me about a binge-worthy Netflix show on simplifying your home, I decided to check it out. The Home Edit Show features two experts, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, who go into celebrities’ homes and declutter them.
Wait, isn’t that cheating?
Here they are on The Drew Barrymore Show, explaining the common mistakes we all make when it comes to organizing our spaces. They also have two bestselling books and a line of organizational products that are seriously cool.
The women have some great tips, too. One of my favorites is to think of clutter as sort of like eating. When you’ve eaten too much, you just don’t feel good. When your closet is filled to capacity, piled high and spilling over, you feel similarly uncomfortable. The idea is to keep each space at a healthy “weight,” and when you get too many items, rather than buy more containers or hangers, you have to start tossing.
I do much better about cleaning when I’m entertaining regularly, which of course didn’t happen at all this year.
Anyone want to come to a party at my house?
When one of my brothers got a professional job after college, and moved into his first apartment, he called me up and invited me to a “May party.” I was honored, because he’s ten years older than me, and in my experience older brothers aren’t too fond of socializing with their teenaged sisters. It turns out that his “May party” was a euphemism for spring cleaning.
Brothers!
In all seriousness, I’ve run out of excuses the last few months. That saw isn’t going to sharpen itself! If it’s true, as the Daily OM asserts, that “no matter how positive and creative you may be in your inner world, if your home or work surroundings are contradictory or present energetic barriers, you are likely to find it difficult to manifest all that you desire,” then I better set that intention and get going.
Affectionately,
Elaine