TELL THE TRUTH: don't we all love clutter?

My last few posts have been musing on the invisible phases of creativity, the times when we are consciously or unconsciously doing deep inner work even though we seem quiet or even dormant superficially.

During these fallow off-seasons, we have to do some very hard work.

And the hardest work of all, maybe, is not doing the wrong work.

Because doing some work, any work, can feel very tempting at such times. We're conditioned to be busy 24/7. To be productive. To get things done. To make progress. To move forward. To push on. Not just to "task," to multitask.

The mere fact that these phrases are so familiar speaks to how powerful these impulses are in our culture.

That's why I say that if we tell the truth, we all secretly love clutter. Not physical clutter, but time clutter, work clutter, creativity clutter, social clutter, media clutter. On some level, most of us love filling up our to-do lists, cramming our lives and time full to bursting. We love it because it makes us feel normal. Worthwhile.Needed.  Safe.

Or maybe that's just me. Either way, I see a lot of that kind of that "busywork" as I look back on my life. In my defense, I didn't know it was "filler" at the time. I had lots of "good reasons" for doing it. And I'm proud to say that I did some of it, even lots of it, very well.

But doing the not-quite-right work well doesn't make it any less wrong.

I think it takes an odd kind of courage, in modern America, to refuse the clutter, to wait for clarity or the "real thing," to sit with our own emptiness.

To embrace the space, not give in to the clutter.

To trust that the creative well will fill up again, that the path will appear, that the daffodils will bloom.

I'm not very good at it yet. But I'm trying.

DECLUTTERING OUR MONEY: have you made a home for yours?

As I began to look at the way money "clutter" affects my creativity, I immediately discovered something interesting.

Despite the large and lovely spaces in my house, my money-related stuff has no single home here. I keep checks in one place, stamps and envelopes in another, records in still another. Some of my bills arrive via email, some via snail mail, which I pick up from the post office, put on the breakfast bar, and get to in some moment when I'm not busy at other things. I sit down and pay bills, or handle other financial matters, in a variety of places--the breakfast bar, my bed, my dining room table. No problem, except that I almost always leave a trail of stuff that then has to be put away in what seems like twenty different places.

As I said in my previous post, I'm quite good at getting things handled on time despite this hit-or-miss, here-or-there methodology. Yet I know that the price I pay for it is high in other ways. I may seem organized to the folks at FPL or FICO or American Express, but I don't feel it. Low-level money fogginess invades my mind often, sometimes when there's actually nothing wrong. I work much harder on trivial financial tasks than I have to, and spend less time than I'd like thinking about bigger money issues.

On a symbolic level, I think, not giving our money a true home in our space speaks volumes about how much we honor it and the role it plays in sustaining our lives in general and our creative work in particular. If I don't respect this aspect of my life enough to carve out a little physical space for it, how good can my stewardship of it truly be? If I begrudge my money a couple of square feet and a little organization, can I really complain if it doesn't work for me with optimal results? To my mind, the answers are "not very" and "hell no." I don't say this in judgment of myself or anyone else. I've never yet met a woman whose family trained her in financial management or encouraged her to make space or time for her money. And when we enter the world of the creative arts, money dis-ease becomes a badge of honor. It's not surprising that so many of us avoid money matters when we can, hurry through them when we must, and leave them homeless in gorgeous, thoughtful residences that have room for everything else.

I'm currently in the process of giving my money its own functional and appealing space in my home. I've made a space under the giant vision board some of you have seen in my home office and given financial records a whole file drawer. (Whoo-hoo!) I've gathered envelopes, stamps, pens I like, a letter opener, a scissors. I've dedicated a simple monthly planner to recording what bills are due, when they're due, and what and when I've paid. I've put a chair near that area to remind me to work on it there and some wonderful images right above it to remind me why it's worth my time.

I have to admit that this feels childish at times, like I'm setting up an Easy Bake Oven in the living room and pretending to be a chef. That feeling disconcerted me at first, but I realized pretty quickly that it's perfectly appropriate.

At fifty-five, a novelist and a poet and a memoirist and a teacher, an owner of my own business and a veteran of management roles in financial organizations and the former owner of a New York apartment, with a house that has an art room and a writing room and a reading room and a lounge, I'm just now taking baby steps on decluttering my money issues.

So setting up an Easy Bake Oven equivalent—let's call it Shaky Suzy's Marvelous Mini Money Mart—is probably right on target.

Wanna come over and play?

STEVE JOBS on decluttering your heart

When I wrote my 10/28 "Decluttering Your Heart" post, I didn't expect to follow up its Sarah ban Breathnach quote with one by Steve Jobs.

But a recent email contained the link to an interview former Apple CEO John Sculley conducted with Steve Jobs, Apple's visionary co-founder. The lengthy interview is interesting on business grounds, but it also contained a quote relevant to decluttering. "What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist," Sculley said.

It makes sense. We all know that visionaries don't change the culture by trying to do everything. They focus on one thing, at most a small handful of things, passionately, even if others can't figure out why they're doing it. But following that model is easier said than done. Right now, I'm struggling with getting even minor things off my desk, schedule, and mind. Everything, and everyone, seems equally important, and it feels hard if not impossible to find the time I need to get in touch with what truly matters.

It's tempting to think that famous, accomplished people don't experience that kind of struggle...that it's somehow easy for them to decide what to do and what not to. But that fantasy isn't borne out when you look at Steve Jobs' life, or the life of any other topnotch creative. As far back as his decision to drop out of college, Jobs has clearly experienced just as many points of confusion and choice as us "ordinary people" do.

But as Sculley noted, he's clearly also learned how to clear out, let go, and move on. And because he's so famous, we can get some glimpses of how he does it.Here's one such glimpse, from his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. (Watch the speech here—it's inspiring throughout.) I love the last two lines:

"When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

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.

TOPPLING OVER

This photo by Håken Dahlström immediately captured my attention and inspired a grin. The crazy angle of the structure is due in reality to the San Francisco hills, but it's also a funny image of the feeling of our houses inspired when we are too laden down with stuff: the sense that the whole structure could just topple over from its own weight.

Perhaps it's the weight of the owner's craft or art room that's making the house list to sharply to one side?

Or perhaps I'm just projecting?

(I've reprinted the photo on a limited rights permission basis from Flickr. Please do not reproduce or otherwise use without going through their site.)

FALLEN ANGELS

When I went to verify the Mary Shelley quotation I used in Thursday's post, I came across another that felt both striking and apt.

"The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil," she wrote in Frankenstein.

I don't like demonizing anything or anyone, so I'm not usually a fan of devil imagery. But this line really spoke to me, and in a way directly relevant to issues of clutter.

The part of each of us that longs for creative time, creative work, is angelic: powerful, pure, a thing drawn from the limitless skies.

When we don't nuture it, this powerful force doesn't die. Instead, it turns on us. Bedevils us, you might say.

The love for color, beauty, and abundance that inspires creative work transforms into destructive relationships with shopping or TV.

The desire for good tools with which to create new things transforms into a studio or office chock full of supplies or books—so full of them, in fact, that there is no room to do the work they were acquired for.

The passion and intensity that might fuel a novel, a play, or a piece of visual art transforms into rage, resentment, or a sense of martyrdom, or a flat, exhausted depression.

The curiosity that is intrinsic to all creativity transforms into endless hours of Web surfing.

Fallen angels; malignant devils.

The way to exorcise these malignant devils is neither to castigate nor to blame them.

It is to find the fallen angels each of them once were. To ask what dream or hope or passion or love each represented before we forced it "down to earth." To look through even our greatest messes for the feathery beauty of wings.

Somewhere in your clutter, I promise, you will glimpse them.

CLASSES AND GROUPS: "Friend. Good!"

The quote in the post title above—"Friend. Good!"—is from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's great novel Frankenstein, where it is uttered by Dr. Frankenstein's monster. I've always liked this tiny snippet, not just because friends are indeed good but also because it is so moving to hear these words uttered by a creature who is so many ways is monstrous, distorted, unlovable. They are deeply human words, from a painfully inhuman source.

I was reminded of this paradox by my recent DeClutter Your Creativity workshop and the first meeting of my mothly DeClutter Your Creativity group last Tuesday. When clutter of any kind overtakes us—in our space, our time, our obligations, our inner judgments or our inner demands—our first tendency is often to isolate ourselves. It feels safer when no one knows how overwhelmed we are. It feels safer when no one sees the way our stuff has taken over. It feels safer not to test the loyalty of those who claim to admire, like or love us. True, they've believed in us thus far...but surely when they realize how really (cluttered, messy, confused, fill in your own word here), they'll finally give up.

Clutter breeds confusion, self-doubt, and shame. Confusion, self-doubt and shame breed isolation. Isolation breeds clutter. So the cycle begins, and so it continues.

But it can be broken—and the best place to break it is not by clearing clutter, but by reaching out for companionship.

That's what is so deeply rewarding for me in offering my DeClutter Your Creativity classes and groups. I hope the content offered is helpful, but I'm also clear that the real transformation occurs as the participants talk, laugh, and bond. As each of them—each of us—sees that other competent, creative people struggle with the same issues we do, shame and isolation both begin to melt away. We change from isolated victims of inner wounds to a regiment of warriors all fighting the same battles, and from an assemblage of unconnected individuals to a group of friends.

We begin to feel human, rather than monstrous, again.

And from that moment, the cycle is broken, and the clutter begins, however slowly at first, to move away.

"Friend. Good!" Indeed. I thank all my students and group participants for reminding me of that. And I invite all of you who are reading this to reach out to someone today, now, no matter how many piles of stuff you have on your house or studio floor. Ask him or her over, or go out someplace fun. Do it first, before you try to clean up. If you can make it to the DeClutter Your Creativity group (next meeting is October 19 from 6 to 8 .m.), we'll welcome you with affection and laughter. But if not, just call a friend.

CREATIVE COMMUNITY: the antidote to creative clutter

Last night, I taught the first session of a two-meeting offering of my DeClutter Your Creativity class. As I sat around the workshop table, it is not an exaggeration to say that I was absolutely awed by the intelligence, humor, insight, strength and energy of the participants. Each is truly an extraordinary woman. And part of that extraordinary quality, I think, is that each sees her life and creativity as a work in progress, something that both changes on its own and requires conscious change over time to respond to new challenges, new opportunities, new wishes, new needs, new visions.

As I sat talking and laughing with these women, I was struck by how different this form of decluttering is from the usual approach to it. I don't know about you, but most of the decluttering efforts I have made over the years have been done in solitude and with some level of shame, frustration, and confusion. They have been marked by a kind of grim determination to "get it done" rather than a spirit of celebration or joy. And though I wasn't conscious of it at the time, they have been imbued with a sense of aloneness, a tacit assumption that I am the only person in the world to have too many mementos or beads or collage papers or old photos or...well, you get the idea.

But as last night reminded me, that sense of aloneness is nothing short of a lie: a profound and profoundly destructive untruth.

Everyone who tries to live their life consciously is involved in a more or less constant process of clearing out the past.

Everyone who engages in a creative practice of any kind--humble or grand, public or private, literary or artistic or musical--is involved in a more or less constant process of reinventing their work, their process and themselves.

And there is something healing about being reminded that we are all on this same journey together, walking side by side.

Next time you think about clearing out or decluttering, don't start the process with ten plastic bins, an afternoon alone, and an attitude of heroic self-discipline.

End there if you must. But start by reaching out to at least one person like yourself, who "gets" how glorious you are and how inevitable this kind of work is.

Start the work of decluttering with a sense of community.

Release what no longer serves you by remembering the human connections that do serve you.

Begin to let go of what you have by affirming all that you are.

If you do, I promise that the decluttering journey will go more smoothly, reflect your needs more authentically, and get done more quickly.

If you would like to join one of my DeClutter Your Creativity workshops or groups to help start a decluttering journey amid others like yourself, I would be honored to walk this walk with you. But this is not a plug for my work. Though I hope my offerings bring helpful ideas and helpful pepple to the table I want to be utterly clear that you don't need me. You can make the creative human connection I suggest above with one good friend and a phone.

Creative community and authentic connection are the antidotes to clutter.

Try them, and you'll see.

THE TIMES ON "DE-STUFFIFICATION"

This article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, "But Will It Make You Happy?" appeared in the New York Times yesterday. Seems fitting that it was published in a paper housed in one of the world's great capitals of overconsumption.

Thoughtfully brought to my attention by my friend cj Madigan, the piece looks at simplification in this time of economic challenge. I appreciated the fact that it moves from a story about physical decluttering to a nuanced exploration of deeper issues, including research not just on what people buy but on how satisfying those purchases are.

I share it not because I believe that we need to toss out all our stuff, but as an invitation to continue thinking consciously and clearly about the role things--as opposed to experiences, for example--play in the creative life.

It was also heartening to see the current recession spoken of in a positive context, with a focus on some of the things it has brought the country as well as what has been lost.

SORTING SUZANNE'S STUFF

Some nice comments about one of my recent poems by my friends Barbara and Peace Sanchez prompted me to glance through my file of my own poetry yesterday. (Before I go on, a thanks to Sky, Peace's sister and the mom of two of the world's most adorable little girls, for her great email as well.)

Here's a piece from February 2009, written during a period when I was intensely decluttering my arts and crafts supplies. It was really fun to write a big miscellaneous overabundant poem about overabundance and a visually shaped poem about visual art supplies, as well as to work the line lengths as they sprawl out and then constrict again. The turn toward ruefulness of the final line happpened unexpectedly, yet felt right. There's something so cathartic about making art from experiences fraught with frustration, and also about making a little fun of oneself. Might just be coincidence, but shortly after the poem was finished the studio decluttering process seemed magically to take hold. I've had absolutely no time to bead or collage of late, but all the little bits and pieces for those activities sleep peacefully awaiting their wake-up call, and fit perfectly into the limited space I was willing to devote to them. Ah, the power of the written word!

STUFF

Stuff everywhere:
no longer stuffed

anywhere, burst of bright sweets from a reft pinanta,
sparks from a Roman candle, bugs scurrying
wild in a sudden glare: paper and cord,
beads and brushes, sketchbooks
and inks,

evicted
from albums, armoires,
bags, baskets, bins, closets,
cupboards, drawers, folders, tubs, totes
(all, mind you, gorgeously labeled, color-coded, styled)

onto counters, floors, tables, sofa, bed; no surface, no plane,
no mesa for that matter, would seem wide
enough to hold this vivid
clutter; this is a
diaspora

of sorts,
minor and mostly
benign but an uprooting
nonetheless, a material nation expelled
from its longtime homelands by a (minor and mostly)

benign) despot queen beset by mental coup, creative
apoplexy, itchy feet, bottle neck, hot flash, hot
need: as antic as her own court jester,
as possessed as Ahab by
his dream;

her dream,
just as madly pure
and maybe as elusive, glimpsed on far
over the flotsam, jetsam, chop: space to make
art, not just own art supplies; time to play; room to move

and remove; the clear decks, fresh start, clean slate
that she has rarely seen.


"Stuff" poem © Suzanne Fox 2009. Please do not reproduce without permission.

SIMPLIFICATION FOR STUFF-LOVERS

The Zen Habits blog by Leo Babauta is one of the more successful blogs there is, currently visited by over 185,000 readers and often counted among the country's top one hundred blogs. It collects all sorts of interesting perspectives on life clarity and choice. (It's not exclusively or even Zen, despite the title.) A recent browse there turned up a nice guest blog by Barrie Davenport of Live Bold and Bloom titled "How to simplify when you love your stuff." If you're a creative person with clutter on your mind or in your closets, take a moment to click here to read the piece. It's a nice perspective on the theme I spoke of in my June 4 post, "Simple is not the same as minimal," containing some interesting questions to ask yourself about your stuff and some welcome reassurance that serenity, simplicity, and an uncluttered spare room are indeed posssible even when you just can't live without your collection of 1940s pincushions (or whatever your personal possession passion happens to be).

DECLUTTER TOOLS, I: the digital camera

Many of us save what I call "fossils"--objects from our pasts--because we're afraid that once they go, the memories will too.
A digital camera is an elegant way to solve this problem. You can take as many images of the object as you want. You don't have to pay to print them or make room to store them. And you can use them--repeatedly and variously, if you wish--in artwork or legacy projects such as scrapbooks, albums, collages and more.

I began taking digital photos of my parents' odds and ends in the late stages of clearing out their home. The important stuff had been given to one of us kids, a friend or a charity by then. But there was a lot of unimportant stuff left that I found hard to let go of. Shirts or shoes I remembered them wearing. Miscellaneous plates, pots or pans. Cardboard boxes with my mom's handwriting on them. Lots and lots of silly bric-a-brac.

There was no way I could keep all these things, which totalled up to many, many boxes. Yet each had its own memory. Once I realized that I could honor the memory in photographs, the releasing of the actual stuff got easier. Not easy; it never got that. But easier. And in retrospect, I find that the images feel more respectful to my folks than keeping the actual things ever did. They're not stuck away in some box I never look at. They're permanently preserved. I can browse through them whenever I want. I can email them or share them. I can write about them. In other words, the photographs can be changed or used in ways that the things themselves could not.

As I began to realize this, I started taking quick digital photos any time I was decluttering something I knew needed to go but had some emotional hold on me. Projects I had decided I wasn't going to finish, furniture that served its purpose before, clothes I'd loved but no longer fit into. The images are a kind of record of the richness of the tangible mementos of my past...preserved in a way that honors not only my past but my present.

MIRÓ'S STUDIO: maximum stuff, minimal distraction

Here's a little reminder that decluttering your creativity is not the same as having an empty studio or writing room. As I always say, it's not about the stuff...it's about whether the stuff supports you or constricts you, opens you up or shuts you in.

The stuff in the studio of late Catalan artist Joan Miró definitely did the former. Even though there was definitely a lot of it.

I've given you a link to a photograph of his studio coupled with a lovely little memoir from Robin Lough about filming Miró: Theatre of Dreams. (Sadly the film, which looks wonderful, is affordably available for purchase only in Britain.) Lough and the crew got a rare gift: the opportunity to actually film Miro, then 84, at work there.

I was inspired to look it up by a gift from my friend Donna Morris: a little book called Miró’s Studio, written by the artist's grandson Jean Teodoro Punyet with photographs by Jean-Marie de Moral. Donna has a wonderful eye for art, artifacts, and books, and is also a thoughtful and dedicated declutterer. It's no surprise that the book is delightful and much to the point. Here's what it has to say about the artist and his stuff:

Miro was particularly attracted to old and battered objects that had been abandoned as "of no further use." When walking on the beach or in the hills he would indulge this attraction...In 1978 he explained that 'my present absorption in all these bits and pieces, all these treasures, is quite new. I've been hypnotized. When I go for a walk I don't hunt for objects as if I were looking for mushrooms. There's a sudden force, bang! It's a magnetic force that makes me look down at a certain moment.' His studio gradually filled up with shells, roots, empty cans, bones, pumpkins, pine cones, almonds, snail shells and bat's skeletons, among other things—and not forgetting his collection of traditional and folk art.

And about the artist's studio in Palma, Majorca, created when Miro was sixty-three:

For the artist the space had religious significance. It was a place for meditation, solitude and creation. The only sounds were his breathing and the creaking of his rocking chair when he sat down to think. Miro concentrated very intensely when he was working, lying in wait for the slightest incident, the spark that would lead him towards new perspectives.

So how does a creative person get from a motley collection of empty cans and bat skeletons to the regular and joyous production of art? I suspect the key is in that word "concentration." Though perhaps beginning with the inspiration of an object, Miro was able to move past it into a deeper, more expansive interior space. He might have begun with "stuff," but he didn't end there.

You might say that he was able to declutter his imagination, whenever and wherever he wanted to.

ABUNDANCE AND INTENTIONALITY: a lesson from the garden

When I lived in Manhattan, I walked the ten blocks or so to Central Park's Conservatory Garden frequently during the spring and summer. When you live in a single 13 by 18 foot room, you need all the outdoor spaces you can get. I used the Garden as a kind of extended living room, a place where I could read, or think, or even snooze.

My favorite part of the space is the South Garden, a circle of English-style perennial beds ringed with lilac bushes. As the summer wore on the perennial garden grew more and more colorful and rich, its beds crowded with what seemed like hundreds of varieties of blue, purple, and yellow flowers, each of course with its own particular color and texture of foliage. At summer's height there was barely an inch of soil to be seen from the paths, just a crazy gorgeous profusion that seemed at once utterly random and completely right.

Think about the densest and most complicated garden you've visited.

Did it seemed "cluttered"?

I'd bet the answer is no.

Profusion is not the enemy. Abundance is not the problem.


The South Garden is abundant in an intentional and balanced way. The flower beds are densely packed, but the paths still leave room for movement.

Don't worry about how much stuff you have. Think about how intentional it is: how much it reflects or doesn't reflect your wisest choices for your creativity and your life. Think about how balanced it is: how well the profusion that inspires and nurtures you is balanced with clear space to move, dream, and create.

A lesson from the garden: we can't become "decluttered creatives" just by weeding stuff out.