DECLUTTERING THE HEART

In the course of adding links to yesterday's post, I came across an interview Debra Pickeet conducted with Sarah ban Breathnach way back in 2006.

Most of the material there was of course outdated, but one line caught my eye.

"It's about de-cluttering the heart before the closet," Ban Breathnach said, speaking about the domestic transitions that inspired her Moving On: Creating Your House of Belonging with Simple Abundance.


Decluttering the heart before the closet. Perhaps because they are in some ways mysterious, subject to a variety of possible interpretations, the words resonate for me in many ways. Indeed, they express one of the key things I hope my DeCluttering Your Creativity classes and groups encourage participants to do.

As I've learned from personal experience, decluttering our closets doesn't work unless we also clear out our hearts, our souls, and our imaginations. It's internal clutter—unmourned losses and unhealed wounds from our pasts, unexamined fears about our futures—that most powerfully drives external clutter and the behaviors that create it. If you're like me, it's tempting to attack things the other way around, to clean out the closet first and expect the heart to change in response. But genuinely satisfying as the physical clearing-out may be, I've found that it tends not to endure if clutter in the heart and soul are left behind.

Decluttering the heart is harder than decluttering the closet. It takes more patience, more thought, and more compassion. Above all, it takes more courage. Luckily, most of us have considerably more courage than we think. We move out some of that heart clutter and find it there: forgotten or even abandoned, half-hidden, yet glowing and strong.