Spring Cleaning

Its somewhat a tradition in spring to go through the stuff you’ve accumulated and make decisions on what to keep and what to sell, giveaway or discard. As I’ve become older there is often less things I need to discard because I’ve taken more care in what I choose to include in my stuff. Curating your own stuff is an interesting journey sometimes. Each thing may or may not have some sort of significance, a particular memory attached to it. Stuff that has no emotion attached to it is easy to discard. Stuff that has happy memories even if the thing is no longer useful might be more difficult to include in your spring yard sale.  But its just stuff. And in the end, none of it will be coming with us.

An internal spring cleaning is also important for us to do occasionally. Sometimes we carry around ideas, beliefs, thoughts that once may have been true but now are no longer true nor useful. When we continue to carry around these untrue beliefs they will often bog us down from moving forward and growing as a person. The inside work is always harder. They say we are not the person we were in our past, and for most of us that’s absolutely true. That 20 something version of me was a different person, had different ideas, viewpoints, likes and dislikes than the 50 something person I am now. For me to carry a belief I held to be true when I was that 20 year old now into my 50’s only serves to slow down my present progress. Besides, the world itself is not the same as it was 30 years ago.

The inside job as they say, is always the hardest. Yet its an important process that we must go through in order to move forward. Why is moving forward so important? The alternative is to stay in place and hope that you are still relevant to everything else that’s moving around you.

As I go through my own spring cleaning this season my end goal is to feel lighter and to have space to welcome new ideas, new explorations of life and create new memories that I’ll later curate in future spring cleanings.