Cleansing

It feels good to cleanse and throw things out. It feels good when you do it from your closet, off your desk, off your purse, but also out of your life. A lot of people tend to hold tightly into things and "clutter up" with a whole lot of unnecessary stuff. The reasons for it may be many, but basically, for me, it's due to lack of confidence. People who save things because "they don't know when could they use them", or those people who would pack up even the walls of their homes when they are leaving for an overnight stay somewhere, because "you never know", and can actually tell you about that ONLY, ONE TIME when their prevision actually worked. Sure, there are stuff hard to leave, and us women usually have problems with that, which is why the overwhelming majority carries purses filled to capacity with our "bare necessities". Of course, through the years we learn to select stuff, and really carry around only what we really need, but that's not always the case. (Problem comes when you do your "time-and-necessity benchmark" and realize that you actually have to carry a whole lot of heavy stuff on daily basis, which in my case is my journal an a book to read, for the many times in which I'm bored out of my head, or to satisfy my compulsive need to write, OR to break away from all this crap and submerge in a nicer dimension where everything makes sense [even if I'm reading Kafka].)

For a while now I've become a "Spirit Liberalization" partisan, and at least once a year make an evaluation of my stuff, categorize it and throw away everything that's no longer of use, or has proven not to be useful to my normal activities. Movies, tapes, books, clothes, shoes, bags, music CDs, files, documents, tchotchkes, decoration, toys, jewelry, electronic devices... it all gets sorted out and the discarded items either get donated (to my family, it hardly makes it past Mom and Julie) or discarded.

The feeling is awesome and I'd love to recommend it to everybody, because it feels like letting fresh air in. The very process, no matter how long and hard and tiring is, is full of joy at every step. It's like a big party. Of course, the best part is when you do it all by yourself, where all criteria and decision, the tempo, the progression, the direction, the labeling is ALL done by yourself. No third parties adding external inputs: it's all YOU. And, so, as you sweat, as you work, as you do it, and as the fresh air starts to flow in (you don't really have to get to the end to start feeling it) is all YOUR work, your effort, your credit. It's one of those times when you feel in so much control of your fate, the whole Existentialist theory courses your body and you are pure philosophical poetry, and at the same time, not only abstract, but applied, pragmatic as well. You feel so HUMAN and humanist that's easy to lose perspective, broken away from the castrating social conventions that make you believe you are useless without the others, and you feel like a god. I guess I pity those who can't go through this alone. Must be real sad to be so unable to take control of your life, but always need someone there to do things for you. People who spend their lives on the copilot seat, busy blaming others for the decisions they themselves failed to take. Sadly there's a lot of people in the world living like that, and the worst is that many of them don't even realize how negative this is, or even realize what are they doing.

This whole "get rid of everything that doesn't add value-and-function to your life" can be applied not only to stuff, material stuff, but also to many other things, and I'm not talking right now of asbtract things like "attitudes" and "character flaws" and such, but to something a bit more concrete: intangible things you don't need in your life, such as contacts and friends. I mention this because yesterday, I went into my Facebook profile (after milleniums of not getting around), and eliminated a whole bunch of contacts from my "friends" list and even blocked a few of them. My list was already small, compared with the 500+ lists people keep (I hardly reached a 10% of that number), so if I say I eliminated X amount would sound small, but the whole impact was important. In total, I de-friended 16 people, which represented about a 35% of my contacts, and it felt goooood! After all, for real, who keeps up actually with 500+ friends? Who has time for that? Who can properly take care of that? Even my current 33 contact list seems rather long for me, so I'll keep raking it and trimming it until I reach a decently manageable number, probably under 20. Also have been considering taking off apps and stuff that only clutter. Have decided not to close it entirely since that's a channel through which I communicate with my family in Hungary, and with some of my dear Hungarian friends (and because the outlay is far better that that of the iwiw...), but I'll make it more functional instead of turning it into the Chinese-Clutter-Store a lot of people make of their profiles.

Free space, free your mind, free your soul, free your spirit and let air and joy and emotions feel the space anchors used to take in your life.

I love you All.