Monday, January 23, 2012

feng shui and hoarding

    I'm having a get together this weekend and am frantically trying to get my two households (my mom's and mine) worth of clutter junk stuff under control. The basement in my house is finished off and divided into three rooms, what we call "the big room" that's at the bottom of the stairs and affords no privacy and two other rooms with doors.  One is my older daughter's room and the other is a library/spare room. Since we've moved in, the big room has just been a big storage room but the library/spare room has been set up and used by company twice. The other night, my daughter and I moved the boxes into the spare room (one with a door) and the futon and chairs out into the big room. The big room looks so nice as a family room- which it will be some day. It was so nice to be able to close the door on the stuff I haven't been able to go through yet. I thought of all the other stuff that I'm still trying to find a permanent home for and for a brief moment, I entertained the idea of using that room for a junk room.  Then I realized I would have to give up my quiet library and any overnight company would not have any privacy. Plus, I don't want to be a person who has a junk room- that room you just toss everything into and don't ever deal with again.
     That got me thinking about the claim that clutter creates negative energy and how some people feel  Feng Shui creates positive energy flow.  Most people who de-clutter their space will testify to feeling so much better mentally and emotionally.  When I was purging our stuff to get ready for our move from Alabama to Oregon, I had a great time getting rid of stuff. Our local thrift store put up a "No Vacancy" sign and I gave my friend's daughter two pick-up truck loads of stuff for a yard sale and I still have a room full of stuff at my mother-in-law's house I need to get rid of when we go back to visit.  I brought you through all that to bring you to this point- my clutter-energy connection theory.  I'm just wondering if it's not that the stuff creates negative energy but that being the person who holds on to things past their usefulness drains your positive energy.  Is it possible that being concerned with the management of your belongings brings unnecessary stress into your life and closes up your world just a little bit?  Maybe letting go of your junk frees up your time and energy for you to go places or pursue other endeavors that will move you further toward being WHO you want to be instead of being WHAT you own.

2 comments:

  1. I like this post, Dusti. I was raised to never throw anything away and to collect things I don't need. Then I married a minimalist and you can imagine how that went. It has been a slow process but I have been learning to just let stuff go. I totally believe that our stuff holds us back...it can be suffocating at times. Now I have the urge to take a car load to the thrift store!

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  2. Thanks! I tend to be really sentimental about stuff. So I still had boxes of boy's baby clothes when I was packing to move to Oregon. Ian was 7. After cleaning the same junk up week after week, minimalism is looking pretty good.

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