My wife panics when I get into a serious cleaning mode. I don’t like clutter. I easily part with things that sit around unused. I can sort through a closet jammed with clothes, books, trinkets, and other dust-catching objects and discard the majority of it with ease leaving clean sparsely covered shelves behind to hold the items we really need.
My wife doesn’t have a problem with getting rid of material possessions. That’s her mantra too. She’s just worried I’ll throw out the wrong things. Like “her” things! Aw, the price we pay to keep a light load around the household.… We make a good team.
In his article, “The ‘Real’ Simple Life,” Matt Bell describes a sentiment many people are discovering these days as they work to live an uncluttered existence.
He wrote,
Not long ago, a good friend went through his closet and gave away literally half of his clothes. Rather than missing the items, he feels a new sense of freedom.
In a recent Town & Country magazine article, Jane Hammerslough
describes a similar experience. A roof repair gone wrong forced her family to frantically pack what they could and move to a small, sparsely furnished rental house for six months. She writes of their surprise that they didn’t miss much of what they had left behind. Rather than feeling depressed or deprived due to their “hideous living room” and “mismatched plates,” they felt liberated. And when they returned home, she felt “overwhelmed by the utter excess of stuff.” A purging of things soon followed. She concluded that “when ‘enough’ is always just a little more than you already have, you don’t have a lot of room left for the truly great pleasures of life: family, friends, and the time to enjoy them.
He ends with the summary
In our materialistic, marketing-saturated world, simplicity isn’t, well, so simple. But as Richard Foster points out, it begins on the inside with the attitudes of our hearts and minds. And those attitudes are cultivated through prayer and meditation on the truth of God’s Word.
I recommend reading the whole article. It’s very enlightening on how to catch the spirit of living a truly simple life.
I bought a pair of cordory pants that fit and feel great. so i like to wear them all week, the wife drops them in the wash at bedtime and they are clean each day. I dont wear anything else around the house. the wife calls them my “happy pants”. so now what do I do with the half dozen other pants? I have to fess up. I am happy as a clam with one pair.
Isn’t it funny how we all end up following the same train of thought sometimes? I just spent Monday night cleaning and reorganizing two closets and three rooms of my house (a project I’d been putting off for ages) as part of an effort to designate a little space in my home for prayerful study, so I’ve been keenly aware of how many things I own that I don’t need.
I got up Tuesday morning to find that Laura Matthews had just blogged about overcoming procrastination that morning. Wandering in here two days later, I see that your week seems to have gone just about like mine: Addressing clutter on Monday and facing down a nasty illness on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Laura’s blog this morning has to do with handling workplace stress, which I am dealing with this week as an officer in a nonprofit organization that is going through some upheaval that’s causing problems for an employee.
In the midst of all this, it’s so good to find others who are willing to share their experiences and offer ideas for addressing day-to-day problems.
I think this morning, I’ll just pray to know that to all of us “leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings.” 🙂