I was working with a musician over the weekend. All his work spaces were cluttered. There wasn't even a place to sit down. He was scattered himself. He couldn't seem to focus. I picked his music stand to start at. We went through each piece of paper on it. Most of it went in the trash. There was one piece that needed to be filled out and mailed. I got him to complete it.
We moved on to each pile on the floor. He grumbled a lot. That was his habitual braking device. His breaking was a way to avoid taking care of things. I told him that he'd been using it because he felt overwhelmed in general and it was his way of protecting himself, but in the long run it hurt him. I said, "Let's make your life more like a record because a song sounds better when it flows." He got it. We cleaned up all the piles.
This allowed us to explore some boxes. We cleaned out two. At the bottom of one was a mystery CD. It was unlabeled. He put it on his computer to check it out. He played it. It turned out to be songs he had recorded with his daughter three years ago. There was a beautiful song on it that he'd forgotten about. It brought tears to our eyes. It had beautiful lyrics and came straight from the heart. We had to clear a lot of stuff out of the way to get to this gem.