Do-Overs
Friday, January 13th, 2012
I’m so excited! It finally occurred to me that my big huge “study-to-be-a-doctor” office desk was simply a storage space for crap. Books, junk mail, lists of things I’ve already done and crossed off (but I still have the list), old receipts, used up candle stubs, you name it. I’m not even in school anymore. Oh, and my personal altar was hidden away behind everything else, there on the back corner. You could say that subconsciously, I was honoring and giving all my sacred energy to crap.
Not good. So now I have a tiny desk just big enough for my computer, my mug full of pens and scissors, and the file where I stuff all my business receipts, and a little salt-lamp for purity. No room for mess. I’ve installed the first of two beautiful 8 foot wooden shelves along the space under the window where my old desk, the bin of dog food, and the bags of “stuff to give away” used to live (see how poorly my “workspace” was functioning?). The second shelf comes when I get my next paycheck. Also, the cat no longer must walk across my computer’s keyboard in order to access her little heated bed. And the cat’s bed is no longer directly above my computer, raining down cat hairs and other odd dibri as I work (and drink tea) at my computer. YAYYYYYY!!!!!
I’m also taking the opportunity to reconfigure what of my belongings currently live in storage, and what stays in my (currently tiny) living space. About twice a year, I go through most of the house (and when I have one, the storage unit) to make sure that I love and value everything I own. If it’s not valuable to me, if I don’t love it or it doesn’t actually do what I bought it to do, then I recycle it to someone who might value it more. Yes, some of it lives temporarily in storage because my house is so small (and has no closets– none.). But it’s still stuff I’m glad to have access to, and excited to keep and use in another home (with more storage) down the road.
Long ago, after paying $100 a month for a really big storage unit, I realized that I’d spent more money keeping a lot of things that didn’t fit my real life– the one I actually lead– than it would take to buy each and every item in that storage unit brand new. I’d spent a lot of money purchasing, and then STORAGING a bunch of stuff that fit the someday dreamworld in my head, and not the life I actually have. So I made back some of that money by selling the nicer (ridiculously oversized, leather) furniture, gave the rest to GoodWill as a writeoff, and found a $35 a month storage unit for the stuff that I love, use, and probably couldn’t replace because it’s just that old, or that special. Like the gorgeous birchwood bookshelf my dad made for me. Or my grandfather’s old Mason pin. Or the laughing budha that my aunt gave me when she passed away several years ago.
It feels like a do-over week at my house. There is more space in this tiny kitchen/living/office/laundry/dining/craft room than I thought. Even with the dog bed now taking up a whole 3×3 foot corner. And it’s so much WARMER without all that crap piled in front of the only wall heater in the room. And my personal altar now has its own special, prominent, uncluttered place beside my desk. (but not on it) And the cat bed is still where the dog can’t mess with her, and she can watch birds and deer out the window, but she doesn’t loom over my desk, nor stomp across it.
I’m so excited.
Category : authored by: S. Brooke Elliott
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