MIND • BODY • SPIRIT
Purposeless Practicality voice inside your head that argues against letting go of something, even though you’re not using it, haven’t used it in a while, and can’t instantly come up with a realistic scenario in which you will. It’s those phrases, “… but this is still good” or “This is still good”, or “It’s broken, but it could be fixed” or “This still has a little life in it.” As you hold the item, it seems
BY KATHY VINES
Your home is your sanctuary. Or, at least, you think it should be, but you haven’t felt that way about it lately. I hear it every day from people calling me, a Certified Professional Organiz- er®, for help: “I’m just overwhelmed, I have too much stuff, and I don’t know where to start.” They’re at a loss what to do next but they know things need to change and hope that bringing in an expert can help unlock what’s been holding them back, help them move forward. When I speak to a potential client, I listen for their readiness, an indica- tor that they’re in a position not only to do the hard work physically, but to change their mindset about what they own and why they own it. I listen to hear if they are able to face the ques- tion: “What am I willing to change in order to live the way I say I want to?” This change is rooted in critical thinking that can shift our perspec- tive from, “What am I willing to let go of?” to “What is truly worth keeping?” It invites us to make space in our minds, hearts, and homes for things we truly love and use, the things that serve us in our current life and foreseeable future, and to let go of the rest. This isn’t easy, because those minds and hearts sometimes have other plans about these simple ques- tions. “It’s not about the stuff,” most professional organizers will explain. It’s about what connects us to the stuff that gets in our way of making a change. I work with my clients to untangle their relationship to their stuff, to identify the psychological and emotional barriers they face when trying to let things go and develop strategies to move forward. In this four-part series, we’ll explore some of the most common barriers people face when trying to let things go, those statements that start “I know I should let it go, BUT…” and you end up holding on to the item, despite your goal of living more simply and reducing the causes of stress in your life. The first installment explored guilt and gifts and the second explored Future Fear, or “I might need it some- day”. This third installment focuses on what I call “Purposeless Practical- ity”. This is a fancy term for the sce- nario that surrounds your statement of “But this is still good!” Something totally works, and is “perfectly fine”, but you just don’t need it. You possess it, without a purpose for doing so. “But this is still good.” Purposeless Practicality: This is the This is the third in a four-part series focusing on a key psychological and emotional barriers people face when trying to let things go and the strate- gies to leap over them}.
hard for you to look past the idea that something which works or is in good shape must, by definition, be worth keeping. Your analysis of the item stops. That answer seems good enough to be an excuse to not put something in the “goes” pile, and you don’t challenge yourself further. If you did, you’d find that the answer about why something gets kept is often much deeper than what you’re react- ing to on the surface. The antidote to the purposeless practicality barrier is embracing purposeful possession. It means being okay with saying, “even if it’s still good, if it isn’t serving me, I can let it go.” I possess it, for a purpose that I’ve considered, one that makes sense for my life and the way I live it today. That voice that says, “but this is still good,” can stop you from being hon- est with yourself about why you own something. When you do challenge yourself, you may realize there’s more to the eye than just the item. There is often a story behind the item, a story you’ve even forgotten was there. Here’s the kind of conversation in which this might come up when I am working with a client: Me: “I found your tennis rackets. Do you play tennis?” Client: “No. I used to. But this is a new one. Barely used it.” Me: “Do you plan to play again soon?” Client: “I wish! No, but this is in good shape, so I should keep it.” When these items appear, there is a deeper level underneath that I often find when trying to help reveal why an item that isn’t being used still can be so difficult to let go of. It’s when the question gets asked, “So, regardless of whether it is still good, why aren’t you using it now? How did it come into your life, but isn’t an active part of it now?” This requires the ability to look past the item and its usefulness and really analyze and face how it came into a home, why it came into a home. More often, it is to those questions that we find the real sticking point of the useful-but-not-used items. Answering these questions often reveal a story that tells of the vision of that item and how it would be used, or how it once was used. These stories start with “I used to use that” or “I used to be really into this”, or they start with, “I thought I’d be” or “I wanted to use it”. Statements like these hearken up identities: past iden- tities or future, imagined identities that never came to life.
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PATHWAYS—Winter 20-21—29
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