Spring Cleaning for the Soul | The Joys of Purging One’s Clutter

This past September 16th, my wife and I experienced our best anniversary yet. And it was due in large part to new revelations and a new mindset on the topic of possessions and more specifically: stuff.

Krystal had been saying for weeks that she was feeling compelled to begin getting rid of stuff. Picture frames in a box on the bedroom floor sitting for the last year. A barbecue in our storage unit that we’ve never used – brand new in the box for the last couple years. A cat carrier. You know, like the stuff that just accumulates and you can’t let go of, but it’s weighing you down.

On the evening of our 4th anniversary these ideas culminated into a major lobotomy of our mutual pack rat tendencies.

In the course of our discussion which included much verbal processing (that’s the way I come to many realizations in my life), we realized that our living amongst clutter has been not unlike the accumulation of plaque in the arteries. That if you were to look around our apartment and survey the presence of “stuff” stored all around the perimeter of our rooms, the scene could be viewed as a metaphor for the quality of our lives. The implications would include the qualities of cluttered, congested, heavy and burdened, to name a few. The realizations didn’t end there.

It also came to be known that the debt that we had so readily amassed in the last two years was closely akin to the same stuff that has been cluttering our finances as well as our small apartment. Truth be told, approximately five thousand dollars in credit card debt had originated with our two cross-country moves in the spring of 2007 and January 2008. Each time we had schlepped all of our must-haves across the country – literally from coast to coast – and at the expense of a moving truck, 3000 miles each way at a mileage average of 10 mpg and a car carrier trailer for my early model 4Runner. On the evening of this September 16th, however, we realized that had we been willing to part with many of our belongings, we would have never dug such a deep debt hole and perhaps been better off acquiring second hand or affordable items at our destinations. Instead we had subscribed to thinking that every item we’d been given or bought in the years prior were too important to sell or discard and that the lot was worth paying such a high price to transport – twice within a year. Today we would definitely disagree with this notion, but not before a couple of years of whittling away at a seemingly endless pile of credit card debt.

We had effectively borrowed ourselves into financial slavery, selling away both our freedom and our expectations & dreams for advancement, increase and financial blessing, and secured the said debt with our own potential for success.

That evening we took both joy and tears in recognizing where we had been emotionally and financially in the last two years. We joined each other in repenting for the false pretenses we had subscribed to and had accordingly enslaved ourselves with the burdens of both stuff and debt. But determined and excited to see rebirth in our lifestyle, we enthusiastically put our best foot forward on a new plan of action to both rid ourselves of burdensome stuff and over $400 per year in storage expenses.

We’re selling a storage unit full of stuff and giving all of the proceeds away. And we’re loving every moment of it.

Call us crazy but now we can’t wait to be a hundred square feet lighter in the way of stored and forgotten items. It seems so sensible to finally live under the notion that if we can’t fit our belongings where we live that we’ve just got too many belongings. And having held on to and transported at great expense so many things we might need in the house of our dreams we hope to own some day, we’d completely neglected to realize we’d probably be able to afford them again later.

It was as if we’d set aside a special steering wheel cover for the Ferrari we’d have some day – you know, because it would go great with that hot car and would be just perfect for it. The irony being that people who can afford Ferraris – or nice houses – can certainly afford to buy a steering wheel cover – or couch.

So I guess the moral of our story is summed up in this: live within your means and don’t need anything more than what you can use and keep within your home. The process we’re undergoing has already brought us so much joy and newfound excitement. I highly encourage anyone to put themselves through the same type of examination. You might just surprise yourself with what you’ll part with when you begin your own “spring cleaning”.

Tags: cleaning, consumerism, discarding junk, freedom, garage sales, gluttony, go and sell, joy, materialism, matthew 19:16, parting with stuff, rich young ruler