… I can be a bit of a hoarder to my shame, I put my hands up and admit! I prefer if I am not and I am consciously trying not to be. Some of us just hold on to things a bit longer than we should. It would be tolerable if we just hold on to ‘things’ but we end up holding on in other aspect of our lives, we hold on too long to relationships, memories, businesses, ventures, ideas etc that are way pass there use by dates. We believe there is still life left when there is none. We do not consider the viability of whatever life there is left in relation to the investment required.
To keep the ‘car’ going we are investing more than it is worth. We are the maintenance expert without any consideration for effort employed.
I have a friend who is the opposite of me, incredibly brutal when it comes to clearing out. On those days when the mood catches her, she will have a number of decent size charity bags and in, it all goes, the new, the old, the not so new, the not so old, in they all go, if they are no longer serving or bringing joy to her life. I cringe whenever I witness her going through this process, they are not my stuff but I still feel the pain of letting go on her behalf, I tend to feel scrubbed and bruised after the process. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want any of the things but somehow her courage and strength to just clear out without batting an eyelid was alien to me. It is usually more than a clear out, it always feel more like an emptying out from were I stand. But the freshness and airiness that greets her wardrobe after the process is wholesome and restoring.
Few of us are brave enough to allow ourselves to enjoy the beauty and healing power of little or nothing, of disengaging and releasing ourselves from all those things that hold us bound, of setting our souls free to soar. And we wonder why we don’t go as far as we imagine we can, we fail to see the ‘weights’ that anchor us down to our current location. Those ‘things’ gives us our bearing, we know our location and this gives us comfort, comfort of the familiar but not progress, progress is contained in the unknown. Soaring requires lightness that only comes from emptying out and we wonder why we don’t make progress when we hold on to every single thing for dear life.
Sometimes nature gives a helping hand in this process that we obviously are not prepared or able to engage in. Nature strips, empties out, cuts out our ties to anchors and shout out ‘soar’! Nature can be brutal and unforgiving in this process, with the scariest of shears and determination it goes about its setting loose job, snip, snip snip it goes, one after the other without a break or allowing us to catch our breath, we feel the uncomfortable and unfamiliar lightness under our being, the impact of emptying and emptiness hits us, we see no beauty in what is happening and rather than soaring we lament, we wail, we yell, we panic, we frantically stoop back down to grab the loosen ties, we search for our anchors, we want to be rooted back down and grounded and we try and try, sobbing and anxious.
Nature comes back to us and gently eases our hands from off the broken ties and gets us off the ground, reassuring us that it is time to soar, we will be just fine. Timorously we commence the soaring journey with the beauty of nothingness following our emptying out. Now we see that which we never knew existed and it all begins to make sense.
Fight not the emptying out, soar!
Beautiful Ivory 