Last week I worked on the phone with a client who was feeling stuck in the piles of clutter in her home. She said she was frustrated because it was hard for her to feel at home.
I said that it's hard for us when our home isn't a sanctuary from the world. We have no control over the world. There are six billion people out there with different wants and needs. But our home is our space. When we live with intrusive clutter, it's like the world has moved in with us.
But we can change. It comes in the recognition that it's our space. It doesn't belong to the things in our home. It's okay for us to say no to the things that don't support us. The things we don't love or use are intruders and we deserve to not have them in our space.
We began going through her things piece by piece. She found some things that she identified as being of good quality. I asked her if she actually used them. She thought about it and said that she was hanging on to these things because she saw their general usefulness, but after taking a deeper look that they were not actually useful for her. This was a powerful insight for her.
My client said, "I think my house is full of stuff I don't really care about. I think I'm going to find all kinds of stuff I'll never use, and can let go of."