Clutter to me is books, I cannot go past a good bargain and as I take my 87 year old mum op shopping every week its really easy to buy one or two a week. I am also a member of the Sunday Assembly book club in Melbourne Australia so there is another book a month. Living in a one bedroom apartment this means that I have several piles of them as I brought most of the books I had from the house I was sharing in Northcote and they fill my book shelf plus some.

I chose the above picture because my  desktop sometimes looks like this, I use pictures a lot on Facebook when I comment on someone else’s post, I don’t understand why people share and comment with a heart or something like that which gives you no idea what appealed to you about the post. If social media is about sharing I think people should put in the time to contribute to another/others. I recently created 6 files and categorised all my pictures and files on desktop, heaps easier.

So what else can be cluttered, I recently attended a talk by Mary Anne Bennie, http://www.paperflow.com.au which was fascinating in the way she got people to see how we keep unnecessary things in our homes. The first question she asked was “How many towels do you own’, The answers went from two to twenty, Mary Anne asked the person who replied twenty, what do you do with them. The person lived with her husband and the children had left home, Mary Anne pointed out that they could never use more than four, One in the bathroom each, and one in the wash. She moved through each area of the house and sprung me in the clothes cabinet, I have about twenty shirts, same question, why did I need twenty shirts? Off to the op/thrift shop for some of them. It takes a breakthrough to give your precious possessions away and I am working on it on a daily basis.

I recently met a musician who has gone off the grid, moved out of his home and lives out of his car and on the goodwill of his friends. He has been doing this for  over a year and the way he spoke about it on the night I met him his sense of freedom was extraordinary. I’m not up to this yet but good on him for showing it can be done.

The mind also gets cluttered with the fast paced life we live these days, constant information via phones, computers, media, hardly a break from it if we allow it to happen. I have recently returned to my meditation practice as well as my Tai Chi practice. i find this switching off of the world liberating from the constant chatter in my head. My 60 year old legs do not appreciate the lotus position but I have noticed the slowing of the chatter that clutters my mind.

So where is your clutter? Take some action to  free your self from its hold. Namaste to next time my friends.