This winter break has been a good time to reset and work on some personal goals. One of those goals has been to reorganize my home and do away with clutter. When I get busy, I create piles. When I don't have time to sort and discard things, I become overwhelmed. During this past two weeks I decided to tackle this issue head on by tackling one room at a time. A few months ago, I turned a storage closet/pantry into a laundry room. As a result, I lost a lot of storage and I had piles of stuff cluttering up the dining room/living room space. Just before break, a thin layer of my living room ceiling came down further resulting in stuff being moved and more piles being created. If the first set of piles from the displaced objects from the pantry weren't enough, now I had even more chaos. And when I have that much chaos, I never feel like I can relax. Even reading wasn't interesting because I was overwhelmed by the need to organize and could not relax enough to enjoy reading. This was a big problem.
So, as I head back to work on Monday, I have a newly decluttered kitchen and an organized laundry room. I have bags to take to Goodwill for donating, and I have a few boxes heading back to work. Even a few things to share with teachers. I also have a plan for tackling the other piles that are crying for attention.
While I celebrate making significant headway with this winter break goal, I am also thinking about my "one little word". I have pondered using the word "declutter", but that doesn't seem to feel right. The word "clarity" popped into my head. I like it because with clarity comes focus and hopefully some direction.
However, I have also been toying with the word "courage". I have been feeling blocked in a number of ways for the past couple of years and I sense that fear of taking some big risks may be a root cause to the stagnation. Courage is the opposite of fear. Now, I have a bit of a dilemma since the goal is to have one little word not two. I have been trying to see if there is a connected word that overlaps clarity and courage?!
For this week, I will celebrate crossing a few things off my "to do" list. I will celebrate the start of 2016 with an eye towards clarity and a focus on courage. And next week, I will hopefully celebrate one little word.
Happy New Year!
Thank you Ruth Ayres for hosting Celebrate This Week!