Friday, February 1, 2008

Taking on clutter as a psycho-spiritual malady

I started the new year with my usual good intentions to get my clutter cleaned up. I even joined the Flylady mailing list. I wonder how many other people made this gesture of resolution. As February dawns I can say that I have read all or most of my baby step emails. One time I even got up from my computer and folded two baskets of laundry but other than this, I haven’t been motivated beyond nodding in agreement with her wise suggestions.

I did a key word search on clutter and came up with an average of 1431 searches a day. I am pretty sure there are at least 1341 books, e-books and blogs on the topic. And, there are 5 TV shows on organizing and clutter relief. That’s 25 hours of TV a week! No wonder we can’t get our junk under control!

Seriously, if it was as simple as four containers followed by a massive garage sale, would we need all these gurus and books? What is all the desperation about? From my conversations with friends and family it seems clear that clutter is a psycho spiritual malady. Not only are our reasons for staying in our messes deeply personal, they are also quite varied. I did some thinking about this focusing through my astrologer lens. Here is my rough, breakdown of the Mode motivation for hanging on. In the interest of brevity I will start with one and add the next two in later posts.

Cardinal Mode

Cardinal people have lots of their chart energy in the signs of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, the Cardinal signs. Cardinal energy is best known for its initiating quality. Cardinal is big on starts, beginnings, debuts, launches. The New Year in our calendar falls during the Sun roving through Capricorn. Just think about the New Years tradition of making resolutions. It feels really good to make these resolutions because we cherish the idea of a fresh start. But these good intentions and fresh goals are notoriously short lived. Cardinal folks live in this New Years Day mentality all year long. I suspect their clutter is largely composed of great projects that got replaced by new great projects before they were completed. The Cardinal clutter is stuff like the seldom used treadmill the size of a Volkswagen parked in the dining room, the 15 files of worthwhile but incomplete projects they volunteered to take on for their PTO, Rotary Club, Family Genealogy, Library committee and Boy Scout troop. There will be half a dozen excellent non fiction books sitting about unshelved each with a bookmark somewhere in the first 5 chapters. The book topics will be timely and compelling or historic and edifying. Cardinal folks take on the big, noble stuff but the follow through is not so good, therefore the home or office of the Cardinal person accumulates all things begun but not yet completed.

The psychospiritual drama of the Cardinal person is a hero's quest. Not a single thing they have collected or taken on can be backed out of or tossed away without guilt and the shame of a failed mission. This results in an environment with the kind of clutter that drains energy away daily through a million guilty straws of sucking commitments. To let go of the stuff is to let go integrity. Ouch!

1 comment:

jumper said...

Okay, Terry, you have just described MY clutter - except i don't think I'm a Cardinal? Am I?.... (see, I get to ask that because Terry is my personal astrologer, for which i pay her large sums of money - she's WELL worth it!)