Clutter

[The professional] will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Our environment has a direct effect on our mind. It’s why we feel relaxed at the beach with the sand between our toes, the sun warming our skin, and the surf soothing our ears. It’s why we feel awed and humbled as we stand atop a mountain summit thousands of feet above the valley below, and why we feel dirty in a dirty house with garbage and used plates sitting around.

I am by nature a somewhat disorganized person. Without a conscious, labored effort, my environment tends to become cluttered and messy. When I allow this to happen, my mind also becomes cluttered. It becomes difficult to think and to do good work. When I push through the resistance and force myself to clean up and make everything organized, my mind follows suit. So it is with all of us.

Or maybe it’s the opposite: when our minds are cluttered, our environments tend to follow suit. Either way, our mind and our environment go hand in hand, and unless we are being physically held captive, we always have the option to declutter both places. It’s usually easier to go environment –> mind.

When I would sit at my desk at work and find myself unable to focus, I would look around me and notice papers and folders and notebooks and pens and all kinds of things cluttered up in piles. When I would spend some time cleaning everything up, throwing away everything that wasn’t needed, which was most of it, it felt exactly as if I were doing the same to my mind. I could focus again and do my work.

When I have unpaid bills or relationship drama or a car that needs work or phone calls I should have made long ago, my mind is likewise cluttered. I don’t know if it’s possible to live a life completely free of clutter, but I do know that any small improvement has an immediate, positive effect on my mind. An effect strong enough to feel the benefits for at least many hours afterward.

To prove this to myself, I just spent 15 minutes cleaning my room and organizing things. And now I feel significantly better and more motivated to finish this post and work on some other things I need to do today. An interesting side effect of cleaning up is that the act itself put me into doing mode. I feel good.

If you’re having trouble focusing or doing your work, take a look around you. I guarantee there’s some clutter you can clear. With each item you organize, an unseeable item in your mind clears, and when you clear enough items from your mind, instead of trudging along haphazardly like a floater in a sewer, your work will flow like pure water in a mountain stream.