Monthly Archives: December 2015

Challenge, Letting Go

Letting Go Challenge: Week Thirteen

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THE JUNK:

  • 1. Halloween head dress
  • 2. Feather boa
  • 3. 4. 5. 6.  Towels
  • 7. Misfit box
  • 8. Coffee Cup
  • 9. 10.  Bras
  • 11. 12. Nail polish
  • 13. Book–Intiution: Awakening Your Inner Guide by Judee Gee
  • 14. Beads
  • 15. Dog bowl
  • 16. Phone book
  • 17. 18. 19. 20. Magazines
  • 21. Dead pen

The Halloween headdress is an observation of my impulse spending.  I had to buy Halloween candy for work, so I went to the drug store, and viola, they had minimal Halloween costumes for buy one get one 50% off. How could I resist?

Never mind that I’d have saved money by not buying it. Nevermind that I wore it (and the boa) for a total of five minutes–MAX–while the kids came trick-or-treating at work.

Never mind.  It was BOGO 50% off !

Plus it lights up and has ribbons and stuff.

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I’m not sure how Intuition came into my book collection. Perhaps it was a Barnes & Noble discount, perhaps it was a gift.

I try to read 10-15 minutes every morning–to learn new things, personal growth type things.

I used to enjoy reading metaphysical stuff.  I started it and immediately felt resistance to reading it. But I trudged on, wanting to read every book I have before getting new ones.

Normally, when I dislike a book, I can say exactly why: the writing, the plot, the themes that narcissistic men who stalk women is sexy (ahem, Fifty Shades), but this one I can’t say.  Perhaps if my inner guide were awakened, I could better pin-point  it.

I managed to skim through it, really trying to read parts of it but finding myself skipping ahead, time and time again.

So. Yeah. Didn’t like it.

But it served a purpose: it reminded me that I had fallen into “playing” at meditation. I set aside time every morning, set the timer, and sat.  The dog’s butt was a distraction (my dog’s butt speaks in “Scratch Me NOWNOWNOWNOW!”) , the constant to-do list in my head a constant distraction.

I was doing but not really doing, therefore playing at it.

So I’m a bit more focused now.  That’s a good thing,

THE FILING:

47 things filed. Some trash, others organized in sub-folders, such as Medical (hanging folder), smaller folders: Lab Work, EOBs, etc.

UPPING MY GAME:

Going into my fourth month (wow!), I realized that it’s time to up my game again.  So I’ve done two things:

  1. Committed to completely clearing out one shelf, one drawer, one something every week.
  2. Started a new challenge to run in tangent with this one: Getting Healthy.

This week, I’ve managed to clear out my entire shoe-portion of my closet.  So yay. All of my shoes, with the exception of one, are paired. I’ve managed to lose one of the shoes that I wear most often and have determined that it has NOT been brought outside by the dog, although whether it’s been digested is still a mystery.

Not a bad way to end 2015, quite frankly.

 

 

 

 

Challenge, Letting Go

Letting Go Challenge: Week Twelve

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Three whole months. Three whole months I’ve been doing this.  I’m amazed that I stuck with it so long. Even more so that I keep doing it.

I’m seeing gaps in places–most notably my closet.  I’ve given away a lot and thrown away the stuff that’s not in good condition, and I feel so much more free.

Check that–I don’t know that free is exactly the right word.

Because it’s not really about the stuff. It’s about the stick-to-it-iveness,  without tenacity.  Flow, perhaps. It’s like returning to a natural order I didn’t know I had.

One of my fears was (and is, still, if I’m really, really honest) is leaving a shit ton of mess behind were I to die.

I saw it with my mother as she went through 90 plus years of stuff that my grandmother had collected over the years.

Death is a funny thing. Not to be morbid, but shit happens.  And it’s a huge burden on those left behind to clean up the stuff.

Maybe it’s a natural part of grieving; I don’t know.  It just seems that it would be easier without it.

Grief makes everything harder. Going through a shit-ton of stuff is hard anyway. When grieving, it’s damn near impossible.

But it’s not really about death; it’s not about leaving less stuff. Not consciously, at least, although now that I think about it, perhaps it is a little bit about leaving less stuff.

What do I want my legacy to be? Writing. Relationships. Memories. Not stuff.

But  maybe it’s really more about moving obstacles out of the way. Having too much stuff is chaotic.  Having clutter is chaotic.  I’ve found that it’s draining to look at an overburdened closet filled with stuff I know I can’t wear.   I’ve found that it’s exhausting to look at an overrunning office filled with stuff I need to file. Or so many books that they’re falling from the shelves.  It’s like a giant, leaden to-do list that filled a space in the back of my mind that I carried around all the time.

And every week when I get more stuff out, more stuff filed, that weight gets a little less heavy.

Plus, when it comes to getting ready for work, I can almost see what I have to choose from with a single glance.

It’s definitely more efficient.

Chaos is being reflected in my writing.  I currently have three different–and by different, I mean whole scenes different–manuscripts for one book.  Incomplete, of course.  But because my evil twin (thanks, evil twin!) has become my writing buddy, helping me set goals and checking to see if I’ve met them, I’m really trying to trudge through the first draft.

And it’s like pulling teeth.

I really thought I’d have the first draft finished by the end of this year. With eleven days to go and an indeterminate word count, it doesn’t look like it’s happening.

So. I attack the chaos. Slowly, attempting to integrate the drafts. It’s slow. It’s mind-numbing.  But it is coming together.

Kind of.

So I keep attacking the chaos.

So for this week’s stuff;

  • 1)  Bra
  • 2) and 3) Red and Orange shirts
  • 4) and 5) Blue and Green pants
  • 6) 7) 8) Charts
  • 9) and 10) Pink and Harley shirts
  • 11) Camera box
  • 12) Mirror Piece
  • 13) Purple sweater
  • 14) and 15) Scrub Pants
  • 16) Purple skirt
  • 17) 18) and 19) black, blue, and green pants
  • 20) White scrub shirt
  • 21) Ivory blouse

(Towels will be next week, J. I’d already had the stuff gathered.)

I filed a total of 30-ish things this week.  I lost count somewhere around 35. Mostly trashed (again). Some medical receipts from 2014 that I never deducted, but a few pieces for my 2015 taxes.

If I can find everything that I need, I’ll definitely have enough to itemize rather than taking the standard deduction.   So…more money back.

And here’s George Carlin talking about stuff.  It’s George Carlin, so there’s at least a little bit of NSFW.

Challenge, Letting Go

Letting Go Challenge: Week Eleven

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  • 1. Hat box
  • 2. and 3. Old bottles of lotion
  • 4. Old deoderant
  • 5. “Katrina” dress
  • 6. Undershirt
  • 7. Green pair of pants
  • 8. Blue pair of pants
  • 9.  and 10.  Two broken hair clips
  • 11. Old lipstick
  • 12. Old mascara
  • 13. Old foundation
  • 14. Enbrel information box
  • 15. Shake and Bake
  • 16. Old pressed powder
  • 17. Foot spray
  • 18. Nail polish
  • 19. Glue sticks
  • 20. Lipstick case
  • 21. Dead pen

Filed: 28 things, some trashed (why I held onto old grocery receipts I will never know), some actually filed. Still working on the medical file.

So apparently I forgot to take a picture before throwing the old stuff away and putting away the clothes in my “to donate” box.

A shame. I wanted to, in a few months, put all the pictures together to see all of the stuff–in one sitting–that I had cleared out of my house.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, we picked through mud and dead fish to salvage what we could. Living right off the river, I had discovered there was a lot of both mud and dead fish.

Ew.

I can remember dunking my few clothes in bins of bleach water to get all of the dead fishyness out of them.  One of the things that had survived was a black t-shirt, sleeveless dress that I loved.  The bleach had given it red spots, so it looked like a really bad tie-dye job.

I loved it even more.

It’s been ten years since the hurricane, and, during that time it had managed to grow holes where the red spots were.

Ten years, and the red-bleached out spot became an ever-growing hole…right on the ass of the dress.

Still loved it. Still held onto it. Still slept in it, wore it around the house (sometimes even with a t-shirt covering the hole, but not all the time.

So….it was pretty much past time to get rid of it.

The filing is coming along–I’m still taking out stacks of paper in chunks and working through the chunks rather than fully entering the office itself.

The most interesting thing about the filing is that I’m filing stuff pretty much as soon as I get it (at least during the week that I get it) so, although the headway isn’t exactly grand, I’m at least not adding to the stacks to be dealt with later.

So there’s that.

 

Challenge, Letting Go

Letting Go Challenge: Week Ten

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One of the best questions I’ve ever been asked is, “Where are your hands and feet?”

It sounds silly, really, but it’s one of the most profound things I’ve ever been asked.

I say I want to do this and that, meet this person and that. Accomplish this and that.

But when I ask myself where my hands and feet are, sometimes they’re not actually doing what I want to do or moving toward where I want to be.

So I can correct. No need for punishment or judgment, just a simple correction: put my hands and feet to work doing what I want to do.

But sometimes I am doing what I want to, as evidenced by my hands and feet. Here it is, ten weeks, and I’m still getting rid of junk.

Some of the things I’ve accomplished in the process:

  1. I have a gap on my bookshelf.  Considering I didn’t want to even think about my books ten weeks ago, I’m a bit impressed with myself.
Not a thigh gap--far more exciting
Not a thigh gap–far more exciting.

2. My closet is way, way more organized (not quite finished, but I still have many things to get rid of.)

3. I’ve started an organized medical file for taxes.

4. I’ve gotten rid of pizza coupons that have been on my fridge since April of 2014. Really. 

Some things that have started happening (perhaps side-effects, but then again, I don’t like assigning causality):

  1. I pick things up more often.  I have a tendency to leave coffee cups wherever I had coffee last. I can say with confidence (and yes, a little bit of joy) that the only coffee cup currently on my table–or scattered about the house–is the one I’m drinking from right now.

2.   I’ve discovered I really like giving things away.  While organizing a drawer, I came across several pairs of gloves–things I’ve never bought myself and yet somehow came to own. That very day at work someone was complaining about being very cold, so I found an opportunity to give them to someone I knew could use them.  It’s not altruism so much as it is laziness–I still have this ingrained thing in me that I really don’t want to throw things away unless I have to, and yet I still really, really don’t want to give it to Goodwill.  So I give away what I can to people I know, and by taking it, they’re doing me a favor. I only have 1/4 a box of stuff to go to Goodwill. Some of the stuff I could probably sell–movies and stuff, things in good condition.  I could use the money, but that’s not how I want to make money.  That idea of not being “how” I make money isn’t something I really can  explain. It just feels wrong.

3. I’m reading more. I’m in a race to read all the books I have (and want to read) before buying any more.  Oh, I’m also reading fewer books at a time, which does in fact streamline the process. I’m currently reading Eric Butterworth’s Spiritual Economics for 10 minutes in the morning, and currently, Bernie Sanders’s Outsider in the White House in the evening.

4. I’m adding another challenge–a gratitude challenge. Find one (different) thing every day that I’m grateful for, for a total of 7 a week.  It’s as much about establishing a practice as it is to grow.

So anyway, the stuff:

  • 1. Post-it pad
  • 2. Water balloons
  • 3. Angel candle holder
  • 4. Love and Peace lunchbox
  • 5. Small black bag
  • 6. Red shirt
  • 7. Orange shirt
  • 8. Camera box
  • 9. 2014 calendar
  • 10. Broken dust pan
  • 11. Movie: Mr. and Mrs. Smith
  • 12. Movie: Journey to the Center of the Earth
  • 13. Movie: Hannibal Lector Two Pack
  • 14. Movie: An Officer and a Gentleman
  • 15. Make Up bag
  • 16.  and 17. Nail Polishes
  • 18. Mascara
  • 19. Clearasil
  • 20. Lipstick
  • 21. Eye pencil

The make up stuff might very well be from when I  was i my early 20’s. Some of it looks decidedly goth-y.

I actually filed/shredded 75 things this week, far above my requisite 21. Considering I had 15 separate things (and counting)  on Enbrel, I’m not sure it’s much of an accomplishment.

But it’s something.