Somewhere deep inside our minds there’s a door to a place we don’t want to see, overflowing with heaps of scary old emotional baggage that we haven’t managed to clear away. We wish we could forget all about it, and most of the time we do; but when a present-day experience triggers those bad memories, the door swings wide open, no matter how many bars and screens we might believe we’ve put across it.
 

Scary-looking door set into crumbling concrete with rusty bars and a screen covering it.

(Creative Commons image via flickr)
 

What’s to be done about that door? More bars won’t solve the problem. Plant some nice pretty mental landscaping in front of it and make it less noticeable? Well, that might help a little; but really, it needs the same treatment as a real-life cluttered room full of ugly, rusty junk. Rather than trying to leave the door closed forever, we just need to roll up our sleeves and march confidently in there with a box of garbage bags, a bucket of hot soapy water, and a mop.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

My daughter’s dog (a.k.a. our household’s resident diva) has been living here almost a year, and never would sleep in the first dog bed we bought. When she was a puppy, she took the cushion off the rocking chair (shown in this post) and decided it would be her bed. That worked out all right because we already had two of those cushions; but then she discovered that she could chew a hole in it and pull out the stuffing—way too much fun for a little puppy to resist! After the shreds of the cushion went bye-bye, she still wouldn’t sleep in her bed, as she much preferred to lie down outside my daughter’s bedroom door at night and make sad noises to try and get herself let in.

My daughter soon had enough of that (as did we all!) and bought another dog bed in the style of a large rectangular cushion to put outside her bedroom door. The new bed was sturdy enough that it didn’t suffer the same fate as the original cushion, and Diva Dog was happy enough with it that she stopped the nightly tragic-opera performances. But that left the old bed, as always, just sitting empty.
 

Brown oval bed for a small dog, on white carpet. 

Diva Dog uses it occasionally as a hiding place for her rawhide bones and other prized possessions; but really it’s just clutter, and needs to be given away. I expect my daughter will move into her own place in a few months, once she finds a good rental house or apartment, taking both the dog and the preferred bed along. Even though we’ll probably end up doing some amount of dog-sitting here, there’s no sense keeping a bed that the dog refuses to sleep in!

About Clutter Comedy: Every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering) I post a Clutter Comedy article describing my most memorable clutter discovery of the week. Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!

When we talk about owning our lives, often it’s in the context of taking responsibility for our hard choices and our mistakes. We own our problems; we own up to things. That’s what we should do, of course; but perhaps out of modesty, we tend not to claim as much ownership of our successes and our joyful moments. And I’m wondering if that reluctance to own our good fortune might skew our perspective toward seeing life as made up largely of hard choices.

That’s not to say we ought to brag at great length about our successes, but a little more balance would be helpful. Even our common word choices such as “good fortune” suggest that when things go well in our lives, it is all just luck, and we had very little to do with how it turned out. When we make gratitude lists or otherwise remind ourselves to appreciate our blessings, it’s all about passively receiving gifts, rather than asserting ownership. God made the sunshine, we didn’t. Well, okay, fair enough—but what about our choice to enjoy the sunshine rather than complain it’s too hot? Don’t we own that?

Because we filter all of our experiences through the stories we tell ourselves to explain them, we do in fact own everything that happens in our lives, even the stuff that seems completely random at the time. We choose what part each person and event plays, how significant they are to the plot, and how much emotional weight we give them.

Often we don’t consciously realize that we have so much control over our internal narratives because they are drawn, in large part, from the common stories of our culture. Unless we actively cultivate the habit of considering how we frame our experiences in our minds, we may not even realize that other perspectives are open to us, and then we never reach the point of choosing one story over another.

It’s not always easy to reframe past experiences in more positive terms, especially when many years have gone by and we’ve put large amounts of mental energy into those old familiar complaints, such that our thoughts automatically slide along them like wheels on a well-greased track. But there are always multiple ways of looking at every situation, and taking responsibility for owning our lives means taking the time to consider and wisely choose among our options.

I posted a photo of daylily plants under my gas meter for a Nurturing Thursday entry in April and mentioned in the comments that I would take another picture when they were in bloom. They’re looking good today, and it’s bright and sunny after almost an entire day of rain yesterday, which has made the grass look nice and green too! Here’s the new photo:
 

Yellow daylilies blooming under my gas meter. 

Because the plants are thick and healthy, they haven’t needed much weeding this year. That’s also what happens with our own lives when we root out all those prickly mental weeds of negativity, fear, and bad habits—we’re healthier and have more energy for blooming, and there is no space for weeds to grow back!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

How do you know when something is clutter? Well, a pretty reliable indicator is that whenever you see it, you start thinking, “Why is this still here?” If that question has no good answer, then it’s clutter for sure!

I have a stack of old towels that I occasionally use; and somehow, a child’s beach towel with Barney the purple dinosaur ended up at the bottom of the stack. Every time I used enough towels to get down to that one, I wondered why I hadn’t gotten rid of it many years ago! But it always just got washed and put away with the others, out of simple inertia.
 

Child's towel with Barney the dinosaur in beach clothing. 

This year I thought I’d done a pretty good job of disposing of the “Why is this still here?” stuff. But then I saw the Barney towel again! It went straight in a bag for the thrift store. Barney and his toddler audience may be a happy family, but I’m sure my own (grown-up) family would be much happier with something else!

About Clutter Comedy: Every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering) I post a Clutter Comedy article describing my most memorable clutter discovery of the week. Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!

My husband has a very good sense of how mechanical things fit together. That is not one of my strong points, though; and he often tells me “Don’t force it.” We have a spigot on the east side of the house that got stripped because I turned the knob too far a few years ago, and now it has to be turned off very carefully. We haven’t replaced it because the pipe is in a place that is hard to access from inside the house. So, when I hook up a lawn sprinkler to it, I generally leave putting away the hose and sprinkler to my husband.
 

Spigot set into red bricks on the side of my house. 

Not forcing things is useful advice in many other contexts, too. I’ve always had what I would consider a good amount of persistence. When I commit to a task, chances are I’ll get it done. When it comes to patience, though, I have to admit there’s room for improvement. I recently had a conversation on another blog about how we try to cram everything we want into the now, rather than letting things take their natural course, which leads to constant feelings of pressure that actually make it harder to get what we want. We’d all do much better not to force it!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

June 7, 2015 · 4 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags:

My kitchen counter has a small desk area with a drawer, which I always kept reasonably tidy, not letting it degenerate into junk-drawer infamy. I kept a road atlas at the back and a few small notepads and pens at the front. The road atlas has been obsolete for a long time because we get directions from OnStar when we go on road trips, instead of using paper maps. I was wondering just how old it was; and when I opened the drawer to check, I discovered that a lot of other stuff had been put in there when I wasn’t looking.
 

Desk drawer under kitchen counter, full of random stuff. 

Among other random things, the drawer now contains a set of paintbrushes, some paper-edging shears, a Bible, and a book of crossword puzzles. While it’s good that my daughter has been exercising her creativity and reading Scripture, and there doesn’t appear to be much in the drawer that would qualify as actual junk, I have to say more careful attention to organization would be appreciated!

About Clutter Comedy: Every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering) I post a Clutter Comedy article describing my most memorable clutter discovery of the week. Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!

June 6, 2015 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

Unlike most sports, rowing is done facing backwards. Although larger boats have a coxswain whose job it is to look ahead and steer, people who row smaller boats just have to turn and look every once in a while. Turning to see what is in front of the boat reduces a rower’s speed; so it’s best just to take occasional quick glances, while being careful to stay on a good course and not run into obstacles.
 

People in small boats rowing on a river. 

There’s also the current to consider—when rowing upstream, struggling against the current can slow down the boat quite a lot, so staying closer to shore where the current is not as strong may be the best option. But when the water level is low and the current is sluggish, it may be quicker to row in a more direct line up the middle of the river.

Experienced rowers who are familiar with the river can manage all of this with no trouble; but it’s much harder on a new course, and for those who are just learning. Sometimes I’ve thought that life feels like rowing upstream in an unfamiliar place. Although too much worry about possible obstacles ahead slows us down, we can’t spend all our time looking at what is behind us, either.

We may stop and explore a small side channel for a while, but then it becomes too narrow, and we have to turn around and continue up the river. All those small channels fall away behind us, lost in the trees, the memories forever in the past. Whatever emotions they hold are free to float away down the channel, to be filtered and purified in the wetlands and eventually flow into the sea. Only the lessons learned from those experiences remain, as guidance in finding the best course going forward.

Changeable weather in late spring means we often go from chilly nights, when we have the heat on, to hot afternoons when we run the air conditioner. So when we get a day with pleasant temperatures, it feels especially good to open the windows, let in the fresh air, look up at the little puffy clouds high in the sky, and hear the birds singing!
 

Open window with view of treetops and small white clouds. 

Sometimes everyday life feels like that, too. Maybe we’re under pressure to get things done and feel that “the heat is on,” or when there’s not much going on, it feels as dull as spending a hot afternoon indoors with all the windows shut and the air conditioner running. Opening the mind’s windows regularly to let in some fresh thoughts does us a lot of good, whether we have been feeling stifled by busy days or just by too many mindless activities.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.