TIDY MINDS

They say de-cluttering is good for the soul. I’m just trying to close my closet.

No, seriously, I picked up a flyer for this year’s Mind Body Spirit Expo the other day, to see more about the Italian holiday competition on the back, and spotted an advert for a de-cluttering expert. I had no idea you could make a living doing that, at least without the aid of a TV crew and a big hole in the daytime schedule. And a neat-freak commissioning editor married to a hoarder.

My headmistress in junior school used to tell us, at the end of every term, to go home and clear out our wardrobes because “tidy cupboards mean tidy minds.” We thought she was obsessed and strange, and ignored all such injunctions.

Now I can get my head around mens sano in corpore sano, because when you’re sick you’re always a bit depressed, but cupboards? Are you kidding? Or is there something to it?

This is the idea behind the philosophy of minimalism – that our minds are distracted by a busy/ cluttered/ patterned envirnoment. And then the brain races itself into a flat spin before crashing. It’s an interesting mental animation, if nothing else. I freely confess to being neat-freak enough that one of my favourite things about no longer having house-mates is that I get home to a tidy flat. No washing up evolving life in the sink, no dirty laundry inching its way to freedom under the bathroom door – just a tidy flat. Granted, by Wednesday it’s tidy because everything’s stuffed in the closet, but it looks neat, and that’s all I need.

But as the pressure on the closet door increases, I keep thinking I need to have another major clear-out. The problem, you see, with stuffing everything in the closet and leaning on the door until it shuts, is that you never (well, most people never) then go through the stuff they’ve shoved out of sight and out of mind. So the closet just gets fuller and fuller and anything you suddenly want or need is buried so deep you can’t face the necessary excavations when it’s so much easier to get a new one. Which just creates more junk to stuff out of sight in the closet – I am seeing a pattern here.

It’s just that the mere thought of emptying all that out and going through is way too energetic and time-consuming for me. The stuff in the closet is like some kind of parasite, sucking my energy before I can muster it to tackle the problem, while the problem grows on my mind and the cupboard creaks alarmingly. Every fit of good intentions peters out before I get beyond the first shelf.

The thing is, clearing is so endless. It’s like washing up – just when you think you’re done, there’s another random fork or glass. And because I know it’s endless, it seems pretty thankless, too.

And yet I know I will be rewarded, not only by a closet that closes properly, but also by a feeling of lightness and clarity that comes of being able to find things easily, and from knowing without having to check, exactly what I’ve got. It will, in effect, tidy my mind – Mrs P was right about that. With every bag of physical baggage that goes to charity or the skip, I lose the emotional baggage attached to those items, but maybe I should stop making lists of what’s missing.

After all, clearing physical space is supposed to help clear mental space for the new and the different.