Paper Doll Springs Ahead with Three Empowering Concepts
SPRING HAS (ALMOST) SPRUNG
After a long, dark winter, we’re finally seeing some sure signs of springtime.
For example, we just set the clocks forward an hour. However you feel about Daylight Saving Time (and there are arguments on both sides), it’s likely you enjoyed having more daylight hours in the evening, even if it was just to complain about how tired you were from “losing” that hour the night before.
Depending on where you live, you may have started to see signs of nature’s transitions. Here in Tennessee, the Bradford pear trees started flowering about ten days ago, meaning that about five days ago, a rain and windstorm plastered white petals all over our front doors and our cars.
(Bradford pear trees smell like fish. Some say rotting fish. Allegedly, this scent attracts pollinators; apparently spring is not only the time when a young man’s fancy turns to love, but a young bee’s fancy turns to the delights of rotting fish.)
Spring Cleaning the Stuff
This time of year also brings to mind spring cleaning. First, there’s a tradition of literal spring cleaning. There’s no agreement on how this ritual began, though there are theories that it relates to either cultural-, religious-, or climate-related histories.
Some people place the tradition of spring cleaning at Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which coincides with the first day of spring. Practitioners observe whole-house cleaning called khaneh tekani, or “shaking the house.”
In Judaism, as the days advance toward Passover, homes are rid of “chametz” (anything leavened, usually meaning bread, but more generally any food item that rises or expands, the eating of which is forbidden during the holiday); at the end of the literal cleaning, there’s a ritualistic cleaning with a feather, a spoon, and a candle!
The night before the first seder (a dinner and reading of a book about the exodus from Egypt), observant Jews perform the Bedikat Hametz, one last symbolic check for anything leavened. Instead of using a vacuum, broom, or Swiffer, practitioners shine the light of a candle in corners and crevices, dusting any microscopic crumbs into a spoon.
As Passover and Easter are generally close on the calendar, it’s no surprise that Eastern Orthodox and Catholic families practice cleaning rituals (in the home and at church) at varying points during Lent.
Meanwhile, in Europe and North America, before wall-to-wall carpets and Roombas, early spring bridged the chasm between the cold, windy winters and hot, buggy summers; springtime let people open the windows and doors to fresh air, sweep out the schmutz of lamps lit by whale oil or kerosene and home interiors darkened by coal soot, and generally avoid too much of the yucky aspects of nature coming in. (Oddly, there’s no historical record of people rejecting spring cleaning because of the scent of fishy pear trees!)
Decluttering is closely aligned with cleaning, spring or otherwise. The more you have, the more your space (and your energy) is blocked. Sensibly, then, spring is a common time for people to face the excess around them and set it free. The warmer weather and additional sunshine doesn’t just find us shrugging off our hibernation habits, but combing through closets and drawers to see what can be winnowed away.
Spring Cleaning Our Minds
Spring cleaning (and spring in general) calls to mind letting go of tangible stuff, but also giving ourselves a second chance (the first having been New Year’s Day) to let go of unpleasant, unhealthy, or unfortunate habits. As I wrote about in Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success, there are a variety of ways to make fresh starts for ourselves, whether to coincide with new years, new quarters, new months, or holidays.
There’s one other fresh start I like to practice, and that’s tying spring cleaning to my birthday (which falls later this week). Letting go of what isn’t necessary (or useful), whether physical or mental, and clearing out the cobwebs in my mind, as I approach a new year of selfhood, helps me feel better about my next approaching cycle around the sun.
Benjamin Franklin said that “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” If Ben had been Bettina, she certainly would have written about the certainty of wrinkles (what the cosmetic companies delightfully call “fine lines”) and the unkindness of gravity, but using the days around the onset of spring and my birthday to declutter and refresh my life makes me feel a bit more empowered to fight the onslaught of age-related dilapidation.
To that end, and especially after 2 1/2 months straight of posts about serious topics covering the tangible (master classes on paper management, organizing blended libraries to keep domestic peace) and the scary (unplugging to avoid the physical and mental health dangers of being always-on, avoiding being the victim of a scams), today’s post is designed to declutter the bits and pieces I’ve been saving in my head. They’re scraps and remnants, too good to be discarded unused, but perhaps not large or fancy enough to stand on their own.
MAKE THINGS EARN A PLACE IN YOUR LIFE
Brazilian novelist and lyricist Paul Coelho is most famous for his book The Alchemist.
In addition to his books, Coelho is known for several super-positive quotes designed to uplift, including:
- When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.
- There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
- It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
However, the Paul Coelho quote (in full) that keeps coming back to me is, “I think it’s important to realize that you can miss something but not want it back.”
Whoa. There are so many different ways to think about this. Professionally, I’m inclined to take this literally. So often, clients have stuff — lots of stuff — that doesn’t fit their bodies, their lifestyles, their values, or their goals. We then work to let go of the tangible things that don’t serve the person they are now, or the person they are trying to become.
But the “something” that is missed may not be clutter — it may be a person, a relationship, or an experience. It can be hard (but so enlightening) to recognize that we can feel a powerful enough connection to something from our past to miss it, but still acknowledge that we don’t want it back, either because it’s not good for us or possibly just because we’ve outgrown it.
You may be wistful about something from your teenage years, but I doubt very much that you’d like to be fifteen again for longer than the duration of an idle daydream.
Set aside your memories of lazy afternoons doodling your initials and those of a certain special someone on the paper bags you fashioned into book covers. Instead, spend a moment recalling the scent of the high school cafeteria’s chipped beef on toast, the taunts of “mean girls,” the inability to control almost any aspect of your living situation — or for any of you not significantly younger than I am, the complete absence of coffee culture or Google. I’ll stay this age, thankyouverymuch!
Often, when I work with clients, the thing holding them back from letting go of tangible clutter is the imagined life that clutter represents. As I talked about in The Boo-Hoo Box: Organizing Painful Clutter, “Letting go of your college boyfriend’s tacky breakup letter won’t absolve him of the pain he caused you. But it will set you free from the cycle of pain you experience every time you re-encounter it.”
Letting go of your college boyfriend's tacky breakup letter won't absolve him of the pain he caused you. But it will set you free from the cycle of pain you experience every time you re-encounter it. Click To TweetThere are aspects of our lives that we miss — even the painful parts — because we knew them well, we understood them and they felt as much a part of us as the freckle on the back of our wrist. It’s understandable that we miss the things that helped make us who we are today — the good and the not-so-good — but if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really want them back.
I try to encourage my clients to ask themselves whether something has earned the right to be in their lives, whether it’s a tangible item, an obligation on their schedule, a thought they struggle to let go of, or a personal relationship.
I’m not sure how Paul Coelho would feel about knowing I triangulated Scandal‘s Fitz and Olivia (whom I truly hope are now making jam at that house in Vermont) with his quote about missing something and wanting it back, with things having to earn a place in our lives, but all of these have been taking up space in my cognitive closet, and it’s time to set them free.
FIND THE ESSENCE
The next quote is a more recent one from James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter. Clear wrote,
“The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best.”
This reminds me of a beloved story about Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. (You may know him by his first name, Michelangelo. He’s like Cher in that way.)
His famed marble sculpture David was carved from an 18-foot high marble block that even Leonardo da Vinci had determined was of inferior quality and thus unworkable. David took Michelangelo the better part of four years, finishing in 1504.
Four years, the amount of time it takes (or is supposed to take) to finish college. Do you wonder if Michelangelo’s mother worried about the future of his career as an artist? Do you think she fretted that he should at least learn accounting for something to fall back on?
But I digress.
When asked about his process in creating this work of timeless genius, Michelangelo is reported to have said…something.
By one account, he is alleged to have stated, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” which seems quite poetic, whether spoken in Italian (“Ho visto l’angelo nel marmo e l’ho scolpito finché non l’ho liberato”) or English.
By other accounts, Michelangelo is said to have replied, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”
In all likelihood, the great artist probably said nothing of the kind, in any language. We can’t be sure. (However, we do know that he probably spoke Tuscan Italian with a Florentine accent, so we’re at least able to read the remnants of things we’re sure he said, or at least wrote, unlike others of his era who spoke different dialects of the city-states that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire and before Italian unification. Remember, Italy has only been a country since 1861, so “Italian” has only been one particular language since then!)
Whether we’re looking at the actual quote from James Clear or the (likely apocryphal) quote from Michelangelo, the truth is that at the heart of the matter, what’s important is in there, somewhere, under all the clutter.
With all of the writing and talking that we professional organizers and productivity specialists share about decluttering what isn’t essential and prioritizing what is, I’m not sure the concept could be conveyed any more clearly than what we get from the Clear/Michelangelo idea.
At the heart of our homes, there are spaces that give us comfort, and to find them, we need to keep sifting away the detritus of daily life — the junk mail, the plastic shopping bags, the empty cereal boxes, the broken earphones — until we find clear surfaces to sit comfortably with our loved ones and talk about what’s important.
In our workspaces, the digital desktops covered with different versions of the same files (ImportantProject.final.version7.reallyfinal) and actual desktops piled high with documents we will never file (and if we filed, would never actually read) all distract us from the brilliant work that is within us, if only we could find our way clear.
And, as always, it’s never just about the tangible stuff. Our schedules are filled with meetings that should have been emails, and so many projects that should have been cues to realize we belonged in entirely different careers. Our heads are full of so many good ideas, but they battle it out with fears, doubts, and self-recriminations such that there’s no quiet space in our brains to focus on those great ideas.
Which brings me to the last quote cobweb that’s been hanging out in my head.
STOP WAITING ‘UNTIL’
I’ve been reading Jon Acuff‘s Finish: Give Yourself The Gift of Done, which proposes ways to achieve your goals by removing the kinds of pressure that perfectionism places on us.
In Finish, Acuff talks about “noble obstacles,” dark and twisty things perfectionism causes us to put in the path of our success. One example he gives is the concept of “until,” wherein we can’t start on anything until we do the thing that comes before it, and we can’t do the thing before that until we do one task prior.
Acuff says:
“Until” is a hurdle you throw up on your track until the lane is so clogged you couldn’t possibly get started today. Look at all those obstacles. Today’s not the best day to go.
The tricky thing is that “until” often wears a cloak of responsibility. It pretends that it’s not about being lazy but about making sure everything is in order before you start. It would be foolish to come up with a great invoice system until I really know what my business is about. Once I have a core mission, the rest of the pieces will fall into place, but until then, it would be wasted effort.
Until I know why I have an issue with food, I can’t walk around the block at a brisk pace for more minutes today than I did yesterday.
Until I know what my entire book is about I can’t write the first hundred words.
Until I know where all the stuff in every room of my house is going to go I can’t clean this one room.
Until is sneaky, so you have to be sneaky, too. If perfectionism keeps you (like it keeps almost everyone) from moving forward out of a fear of making a mistake, try the opposite approach.
Intentionally make a mistake. Or, at least, don’t try to put forth your best effort. Yes, really.
You can’t edit a blank page. Don’t sit down with the intention of writing a masterpiece or a pitch-perfect presentation.
Instead, spend 30 minutes emptying your thoughts onto the paper or screen. You don’t have to know what the finished version will look like. You don’t even have to write complete sentences. But get all your bad ideas out in the open and you may find that some of them are workable. One might even be that angel Michelangelo set free from the marble. But you’ll never know if you don’t start. Don’t wait for “until.”
You can’t get fit waiting until you find the perfect exercise routine. Whatever you hope to accomplish, whether you want to be able to run a marathon or just fit into your pre-pandemic clothes, you don’t need to wait until the right class opens at your gym or until you find the cutest athleisure outfit.
Just go for a walk or a swim or do an exercise video or take a class. And if you don’t like it, do something different tomorrow. And something else the next day. Sure, at some point, consistency in some kind of program will probably help you hit your goals faster and with increasing skill and confidence. But waiting “until” something before you start means you’ll probably never start.
You can’t get organized by waiting until you have entirely free weeks (or months) to address your clutter. Prospective organizing clients will call and explain their goals, but say they have to wait until they have time to complete the entire project.
Nope. Organizing doesn’t work like that, either. You need to purge a little, organize a little, and then live with your systems for a little while to see what you need to tweak. People want to wait until the perfect time, but there is no such thing.
We all find ourselves stuck in the mud of “until.” As Acuff says, it wears that cloak of responsibility, making us think we’re protecting our time and effort and money by doing the right thing. But we might very well wait until…forever.
As 19th-century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev said,
“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.”
Happy springtime, and I have three wishes for my birthday for all of you:
- May you feel the difference between missing something and actually wanting it so you can demand something earn its right to be in your life.
- May you find the essence of your space and your schedule so you can focus on what’s truly important. And,
- May you start something — anything — unencumbered by that “false responsibility” of waiting until all your game pieces are in position. Just start.
Paper Doll Post:
Julie, this is brilliant. I love all of this. The Paul Coelho quote – there are many things I miss but I didn’t think about them in terms of letting them go because I honestly would not want them back. The part about Michelangelo finding David by removing everything else – just perfect. The bit that resonates most with me, though, is the word ‘until’. I had never thought about it that way. You have given me a great idea for a monthly class centered on procrastination. Plus, I now want to read Jon Acuff’s book!
Happy early Birthday!
Buddy’s 3rd birthday is Friday. Nick’s birthday is the 23rd. It’s a wonderful month for birthdays and celebrations!
Awww, thank you, Diane! And I bet Jon Acuff will be delighted that his book prompted my post prompting your class. I love when ideas beget other ideas. (I also love when I can find a way to mix Renaissance art, fishy-smelling trees, pop culture TV shows, and organizing and productivity all in one post. This is my happy place.
Thank you for reading (and for the birthday wishes). HBD to Buddy and Nick!
Julie, you always crack me up. Now I’m laughing about bees being drawn to rotting fish. I didn’t know that Bradford pears smelled this way. I guess they look better than they smell!
The word that resonates with me and spring is “fresh.” There is an essence of starting over, second tries, new life, rebirth, etc. How wonderful to celebrate a birthday at this time of year, when you can connect a new year of life with the freshness of the season. Adorable photos of little you btw!
For the record, yes, I covered my books in paper bags, and yes, I didn’t my initials.
I think Acuff’s discussion of the word “until” is spot on. I think I could use that with myself, and also with clients, to put us on the alert every time we hear ourselves use the word. Is it an excuse? Are we creating an excuse that masks as a noble intention? Great thought for me to carry around today.
You have no idea how much I love that I made you laugh, Seana! That’s my goal when I write. Yes, I want people to think and to find solutions, but if I can provide a moment of silliness amid all the chaos of the 21st century, then I know I’ve done a good deed.
For my first few years in the south, the Bradford pear trees always caught me by surprise, making me think someone had left their dinner garbage outside too long. Pretty, but not a “fresh” scent at all. And I’m with you on the freshness of starting anew.
I think a huge thing I’ll be working on during this next trip around the sun will be watching out for those noble obstacles and powering through them!
Thank you for reading and always giving me feedback that makes me feel great!
I thought that “don’t let something live rent free in your head” was liberating…until I read about the difference between missing something and wanting it back! Deep sigh. Thank you for this gift.
Well, we have to give Paul Coelho credit for the gift; I’m just the delivery girl. But that quote was taking up a lot of real estate in my head and I needed to share it. (Once I share something in print or digitally, I feel safe letting it out of my head; if only that worked for all those 1980s song lyrics!)
Thank you for reading, my friend!
I love the idea that you can miss something but not want it back. I miss giving the parties I used to throw a couple of times a year. I loved having people gather, enjoy each other and compliment me on my food and table. That stopped during the pandemic. At first, I missed it a lot. Now, I just remember the good times and really don’t want to take it up again.
I also loved the idea that what’s important is in there, somewhere, under all the clutter. Stripping away the unessential to find what is truly is important is an idea I am going to carry to my clients.
Thanks again for a great blog!
There’s missing good things about bad things, like missing a boyfriend who made you cry. There’s missing good things but not the bad things that go with them, like loving travel but hating always getting sick when flying. And then there’s missing good things but not the less-loved things, like your dinner parties. You can still gather with friends without so much labor; “host” a picnic in the park by doing the inviting and encouraging people to cook for themselves but bring one thing (like sides or desserts) to share. You can have the camaraderie and credit (plus the appreciation of your efforts) without so much of the labor.
Miss the adventure, but don’t bring back all the hard work! 😉
And I’m glad the James Clear/Michelangelo idea resonates with you. This whole process reminds me of the term “good bones,” and how some people can see that a house has those good bones and is worth buying, even if the initial glance makes it unpalatable. Somewhere, under it all, we need to trust that there are good bones!
Thank you for reading!
Thanks for sharing some less common spring cleaning traditions! I was not familiar with either Nowruz, the Persian New Year or Bedikat Hametz. Fascinating how the impulse to clean and declutter feels almost universal. 🙂
I lived in an international dorm in college, so somehow I know a lot of random pieces of Middle Eastern and African holidays, or how to find Lesotho on the map (but not Kansas) or what language they speak in the Philippines (Tagalog). 😉
I wasn’t sure how I was going to tie the three quotes together, but spring cleaning the attic of my mind seems to have worked. Thanks for reading!
Oh, Julie! First of all, Happy (almost) Birthday! I love how part of your annual celebration involves “letting go of what isn’t necessary.” What a beautiful way to honor who you are and make space for what you want to invite in.
Your post is ripe with gems—from Coelho’s “missing something” quote to Michelangelo’s removing “everything that is not David” from the marble slab. The idea of spring cleaning and removing the cobwebs in our minds, spaces, and calendars resonates deeply with me.
Spring is such a hopeful time of year. Things start blooming. Yet they can’t bloom and fully express themselves when surrounded by ‘dead wood’ and debris. They need clarity to bloom, and so do we.
Finally, there is the idea of the gift of being done, letting go of procrastination, and “until.” I ordered the book and can’t wait to read more.
Thank you for the inspiration…and again, HB, my friend!
I knew you’d get it, Linda. I almost did a riff on how a mutual acquaintance of all of ours emailed to say she liked last week’s post that it took her all week to finish, so my challenge to myself was to clear out things in the attic of my mind but USE FEWER WORDS. Well, I came in at about 500 fewer words that usual, but the post, which was originally intended to be a short one, is still Julie-sized! 😉
And look at you, riffing on my concepts and inserting all that NATURE in there! I’d expect nothing less; meanwhile, I’m still focused on fishy trees. I hope you like the Acuff book; he’s easy to read, and you’re the second person who has said they’re going to read it, so I hope he appreciates me being his PR person.
Thank you for reading and for the birthday wishes.
Bradford Pears are an invasive species that most communities are trying to get rid of. I don’t think they should be glorified as a harbinger of spring. You’re not wrong — they are blooming. But they are BAD for those bees, as the three spread and choke out native plants. B-Pears’ rapid growth causes a rapid decline of local ecosystems and reducing important native food sources for pollinators and other wildlife. B-Pears are also brittle and limbs falling on your car are much more problematic than the stinky blossoms. Google “bradford pears Tennessee invasive removal” and you’ll find numerous articles on this topic. So from an organizing perspective: they are a plant to GET RID OF! Sorry, too many disparate words for me to get past this point. But Happy Birthday nonetheless!
Laura, I’m laughing about it being too many words, as this post was about 20% shorter than usual, and you wrote twice as much about Bradford pear trees in your comment as I did about them in my post! 😉
They may very well be an invasive species (and I linked to that very concept), but the trees in my area are at least 35+ years old, so I don’t imagine you’re likely to convince my part of the state to chop them down. You certainly found an interesting take on the “essence” of the post and decided what part of it “earned” a place in your readership. I’ll wait “until” Friday night to continue the conversation! 😉
This is wonderful, you amaze me every time. “You can miss something but not want it back” you never think about it until you read it again and again. Great way to know how to move on and let go.
Happy Birthday Julie.
Thank you for the kind words and the birthday wishes.
The minute I read that Paul Coelho line about missing something but not wanting it back, I knew it would go in my arsenal of advice for clients, but couldn’t figure out what kind of blog it would fit. This seemed the perfect time to spring clean my brain and share it with readers!
I think you and I are on the same wave length–I subscribe to James Clear’s newsletter and I listen to Jon Acuff’s podcast.
I love what you said about Michelangelo and how he crafted David. I like the quote about how he saw an angel in the marble and even though no one knows whether he really said it, I’m going to pretend that he did because it just sounds so beautiful… Michelangelo chipped away at marble just like our clients chip away at their clutter with the vision that there’s going to be something glorious and awe-inspiring at the end.
Hope you had a wonderful birthday!
It sounds like we are into the same stuff — I’m not surprised! And, like you, I want to believe Michelangelo said at least something along those lines, because the “truthiness” of it appeals. Somewhere amid the chaos and the clutter is the home that gives comfort, the schedule that supports, the mental framework that yields the goals. We just have to keep at it!
Thank you for reading, commenting, and sending the birthday wishes!