Unclutter Your Life by Erasing Your Future.

This unsettling practice creates unending possibilities.

tinalear
3 min readDec 8, 2021
Image courtesy of adobestock.com

I have too much stuff. That’s the bare truth.

Anxiety and guilt morph into a low-grade, psychic nausea, until I finally can’t take it anymore. Then I pay the best $89 of my life on Joshua Becker’s course, “uncluttered,” and I have my kitchen to show for it. It’s clear and clean and by far the most beautiful room in the house.

But when the momentum disappeared, I didn’t know why. I took a good look at what I was thinking, and a pattern emerged: My life was in gridlock because I’m giving this away was completely blocked by What if I need this later. The What If is the future-oriented thinking that paralyzes all forward movement.

For example, the bottom of our bookshelf contains a collection of Tricycle Magazines going back ten years. These days everything’s available online, so why do I still have these physical copies? Because what if the apocalypse comes and there’s no internet and I can’t access these articles online?

Really? Sociopolitical upheaval has obliterated the grid and I’m going to be sitting on the couch reading a magazine? When I see it in the daylight, it’s pretty funny.

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tinalear

Novelist. Poet. Musician. Buddhist. Quilter. Animal lover. Visible grownup. Hidden child. Secret dancer when all alone. Makes good bread.