*yawn*

it’s going to be a long day today, not really because of stuff relating to work, but mostly because i only got maybe 5 1/2 hours of sleep last night. now before you start berating me about staying up late doing stupid stuff–i’ll leave it up to you to define “stupid stuff”–let me explain.

i was at church last night until about 10.45pm cleaning out some closets. in the youth room, we have three cabinets where we store our stuff. one cabinet contains foodstuffs, another supplies (pens, pencils, paper, etc) and the last has games. over time, the cabinets become a mess of clutter and disorganization. nancy and i made an effort last year to organize our supply cabinet, but this year we were more ambitious, organizing both the food and supply cabinets. we didn’t really do much with the games, since gina & christine were squemish about cleaning it out after discovering spiders in our other cabinets.

as i was building a bookshelf and watching the bunch of us sort, organize and discard items, i was thinking about how this could be a metaphor for our lives. everyone who knows me well knows that i’m a packrat. i have a hard time letting go of items (among other things) and i tend to be lazy and just shove stuff in boxes or away from sight. if i don’t stay vigilante, my house gets easily cluttered with stuff and over the last two years (especially the last few months) the clutter has become unbearable. and i don’t just mean material things.

throughout our lives, we collect things. we collect material items, friendships, relationships, responsibilities and hobbies, to name a few. we’re often not aware of the non-physical items that we obtain. we find ourselves unwilling and often times unable to shed ourselves of unwanted things. we get stuck in harmful relationships, we find ourselves taking on more responsibilities than we can handle and soon we become overwhelmed with everything that’s accumlated in our lives.

as much as we would like to believe that we have ability to store an infinite amount of things in our lives, the reality is that there’s only so much that we can handle at any one time. it’s important that every once in a while we stop to take an assessment of our lives and do some organization and “uncluttering”. sometimes the process is painful and hard; we often don’t want to end that relationship because it’s always been there, throw away an old childhood memento or spend the time to actually clean out our closets. but the results will always outweigh any hassle that our cleaning causes us. just as our physical closets can only hold so much before the doors burst open and strew its contents all over the floor, our mental & spiritual closets act the same.

over the last two weeks, i made a decision that it’s time to spend some time uncluttering my life. i’ve found myself in places i didn’t want to be, found things that i didn’t want to keep and burdens that I didn’t want to bear. this is something that i go through on a fairly irregular basis, probably on the order of twice a year or so. i need to take back control of my life, as i feel like i’m becoming lost, wandering around without any direction. i need to overcome my mental inertia and just put my mind to the task to clean out those things which were muddling up my life. i need to take back control from outside influences and dictate the way i live. the first order of business will be my priorities. then i’ll work on the house, starting from the top and working my way down.

so then ask yourself these questions: is my life full of unnecessary and unwanted things? when was the last time i performed an assessment of my goals and am i working toward achieving them? what do i need to do to unclutter my life?