The internal workings of mess and clutter

The internal clutter of my mind was, for sometime, evident in my surroundings. At work, my desk and trays were overflowing with papers, unclean coffee mugs and containers of food that started growing a new strain of antibiotics. It became an ongoing joke among colleagues, one of whom even put up a partition to separate his work space from mine. At home it was worse. I would often shove dirty dishes in the oven as guests knocked at the door!

I hated the mess, the disorganisation and clutter that surrounded me every day. There were times when I would undertake a mega blitz, cleaning up my house and sending much of the clutter away. It didn’t take long for the mess and clutter to return, along with the feelings of disillusionment and overwhelm.

My messy surroundings were a reflection of what was going on deep inside. Like my desk, my mind was overcrowded with rubbish: unresolved issues upon unresolved issues. I wasn’t dealing with them, so they festered inside of me and grew their own strains of virulent thought. The issues continued to pile upon each other until other people began to put up partitions between themselves and my issues.

I desperately wanted order — a clear, still space — in my mind and in my life. Life had tied me in so many knots that it felt as if I was unravelling fishing wire. But I was unable to make progress until I took the pivotal step to accept the clutter both inside and out.

Acceptance was not an act of resignation, of saying, “It’s just who I am”. Rather, acceptance was an active decision to no longer judge myself, to no longer criticise myself, and to no longer subject myself to the shame. It was crucial to refuse thoughts like, “Try harder” or “You should know better”: I needed to be where I was.

By accepting my reality for what it was, without resistance, I was able to begin the arduous task of cleaning it up, piece-by-piece, until I had created the clear, still space that I craved. But I needed to clean the inside before I could clean the outside.

Now, there is not one prescribed way to clean up the turbulent mind. For me, cleaning the ‘inside’ meant sorting through all the clutter; traumatic experiences I hadn’t dealt with, creating a festering web of destructive thought patterns. As the mess kept coming, I enlisted the help of professional cleaners, who were experts in knowing how to clean up the clutter of a person’s mind. I also journaled profusely and refused to stop until my mind was somewhere I could live.

So performing a stocktake of my house right at this minute, I would say to myself ‘You know girl, you have come a long way!’ I am far from perfect and there are some random items on my bedroom floor as we speak, but my external surrounds reflect a certain level of order. The same can be said about my mind and emotions. It is quite magical really as through cleaning my inner world, it is now reflected in my outer world with very little strife.

Looking back, I could boil my process into 6 concise points though it was hardly a linear journey! I took many low roads, reverted back to sloppy habits and then calibrated my direction once again.

As my mind became a ‘clear, still space’, my house, my appearance, the behaviour of my children, my relationships and my office all started to become a representation of my internal evolution. Understanding and coming to a place of inner healing will cause your external chaos to sort itself out.

In the end, I have realised that working on the outside alone is a futile exercise, and as Jesus said to the religious men of the time: “You clean the inside of the cup and then the outside”. How true!

Related posts:

The internationalization of FidelityHouse had an important echo in digital and technological world. Also Irish Tech News spoke about FidelityHouse ICO, in an interesting article written by Simon…

I love March Madness. The first 2 days of the NCAA tournament are up there among the greatest events in sports. But the thing I may love the most about Tournament season is the brackets. I simply…

We recently started working on a new feature in the Trade Me Jobs App. That provided us with a great opportunity to test two things, writing all our new code in Kotlin and looking into different ways…