by admin | Apr 14, 2022 | Declutter
I knew I was a 'Collector', and always preferred that title more. It started out as a school boy given a stamp album and collecting the bags of franked stamps, looking through the magnifying glass for rare marks, unusual countries, changed country names. Then it moved into other costly hobbies, collecting medals, uniforms. After university and working for a living I started to collect houses, not just the one but dozens of them, buying them and renting them out.
Nowadays I know that the brain of someone like me works in a way that has been diagnosed as an actual medical condition, categorised and understood by psychologists. People who are hoarders go overboard in the saving of items that other people will regard as worthless. The hoarder apparently struggles in parting with possessions, and this leads to clutter that gets in the way of effectively using their homes or work spaces. Yes, that's been me. I think I can say that I certainly tick that box! My journal entires from the time of that move showed me for sure that I was struggling with the disorder.
Do you have Hoarding Disorder?
Hoarding and collecting are distinct activities. The collector will search out specific items, working to a list or a recommendation of what will be popular or have greater value in the future. They are likely to display their items in a presentable and ordered manner. When an item is placed within an established collection, it is allocated a special almost magical status. By combining it with other connected or somehow similar pieces, the one acquires more value than it was deemed to have when on its own. Popular acceptance suggests that a collection has a value, yet it is only seen this way by other collectors of that niche area. The truth is that collections give to their owners a sense of importance, and are a socially acceptable form of possessiveness. There is social prestige and enhanced status in the mind of the collector of high value items that are brought together under one roof, endorsing their social standing within their community or peer group. Someone who collects watercolour pictures, ceramics from a specific historic timeframe, or vintage cars is seen to be an eccentric, albeit perhaps an affluent one.
The hoarder is not so discriminate and simply gathers random things which they consider they might want in the future. For some, they find safety in the volume of their possessions. Looking at some statistics from the American Psychiatric Association and their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders we learn that hoarding disorder affects some 2 to 6% of the adult population and often leads to substantial distress and problems functioning in daily life. Now I am getting worried about my behaviour! In a UCLA scale of Hoarding Severity (who even knew there was such a thing!) males are more likely to succumb to this behaviour than females and it is three times more predominant in older males than in those aged 34 to 44 years old.
Is this why men of a certain age start to buy sheds for their collections?
by admin | Apr 7, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Allowing love into your life is where so much of your happiness and fulfilment comes from. Not just romantic love, but platonic love, supporting love, and the gentle, caring love that finds expression in friendship.
For love to flourish it needs to be made welcome, to have a place set for it or for it to be able to arrive without notice and make it's presence felt around you. Key to it's arrival is the space for it to flourish and to be able to flow.
Be open to receiving, to accepting and embracing the arrival of love as well as the feelings and emotions that accompany it. If you fight against it, ask yourself why are you so reluctant to receive? If you close its point of arrival, what are you attempting to achieve in doing so?
Do you want to feel the warmth of love in your day, in your life? Then do those things necessary to allow it in, and as much as anything stop doing those things which prevent it from being present.
So clear up the clutter that is blocking your life and causing so much personal and emotional stagnation. Put events in your calendar that bring you pleasure and enjoyment, as well as allowing you to get out and about and mixing with others of like persuasion.
Be open to the arrival of happiness, of joy and feelings of satisfaction and well-being.
To stop these would be to limit your own experience of an abundant Universe and of a world that wants the best for you. Let the love in.
by admin | Apr 1, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Supportive. Nurturing. Trusting. Inspiring. Loving. Encouraging. Affirming.
These are just a few words that might reflect some of the better relationships you have, yet very different from the words you might use to describe those relationships that are leading you in another direction or no direction at all.
Leaving and letting go of relationships that are hurtful, abusive, painful and which contribute nothing to you is a far more difficult process than we might first imagine. Why would we allow ourselves to do anything that is hurtful to us, or allow any one else to impose these negatives? There is no short answer to this.
To even begin to acknowledge to yourself that you are in a primary relationship that is at least difficult and at worst threatening to your well being is a brave first step, yet it is a first step. Without the recognition of the facts of what is going on around you it is very difficult to then take any action away from what is not working for you in this moment.
Believing in yourself is a strong beginning. This may take time for you to realise as being true, especially if you have let yourself be walked upon, or stepped over or you have given away your self-esteem in the process of loving someone. Considering yourself and your well-being as sufficiently important and precious as to be looked after, this is a significant step in the right direction.
Where you see an experience of a good relationship, of caring, of friendship, expand this by spending more time on it and by placing more focus on the good that is already there. This will allow for the spread of that which already is present in your life into more of the same.
In the observation of good friends, the noticing of kindness, the allowing of patience or courage or nurture, let yourself see the display of these qualities and bring them further into yourself and your own daily experience. The more you can encourage this to happen, the less space there is for those actions and behaviors which are in the negative.
Begin to attract to you more of that which you desire to experience. Do this simply and calmly by requesting such to occur in your daily being.
You will begin to see the changes as soon as you request what you want. So ask for this to be here and now for you.
by admin | Mar 31, 2022 | Declutter
Recently we moved home. In the two months of preparation I deliberately kept a journal of the decluttering that needed to be done.
First week of our move
Yesterday I was at work in my office. The word office for this room might seem somewhat grand because it also doubles as a store room for furniture that I have not dared throw away, just in case it might be useful one day when a tenant needs it. So in addition to my much loved roll-top pine bureau with plentiful drawers and cubbyholes, you will see two enormous vintage 1940's wardrobes that I am hanging on to just in case I decide one day to add them into some of the upstairs bedrooms in this building. I have two double mattresses, a nicely upholstered Edwardian straight backed hall seat for two, a solid wood filing cabinet and, in the alcoves to either side of the fireplace, a pair of tall glass fronted book cabinets.
The ample floor space in this room is normally free of clutter, but this week I have made numerous car trips into work with the boxes that were filling my garage at home. I have been doing this before we move house - right in the middle of writing a book about decluttering and letting go - as apart of a deliberate decision to live with less and in a space that is better suited to the life we want to live.
I have eighty boxes to work through and the emotional pain of doing this is significantly more than I was expecting. These are the boxes that I have dragged around with me between homes for a number of years and which I have to open now that we are settling somewhere. I understand that this is not normal, that someone my age would by now have perhaps cracked the clutter code and found a way to let go of so much. I have never found this easy, and have always attached emotions, possibility or potential re-use to things that I have had in my life.
Box One
I opened the first box and realised that not one of several thousand sheets of papers in any of the ring-bound folders in the box were to keep. Most of them had a keep-until date that had passed at least two years before. I had kept them as the Revenue service always ask you to keep the paperwork for a business for seven years after the year represented by those same records. I hadn't thrown them away because I hadn't dared approach the task of sorting, sifting and saying goodbye to them. The box of files weighed fully 20 pounds. I separated the paper from the files and recycled it all. So far, so good. I can do this.
Box Two
Two dozen used A4 pads of lined writing paper, 65 usable pens, a hole punch, a vintage wood and brass manual coffee grinder in good order that I had been given by friends in Belgium when I was perhaps eighteen. That was some decades ago. I had wondered where it was! The pads of notepaper went onto a stationery shelf, and the pens went into a plastic bag for donating to my local library. They are always running out of pens and I love to work there on new manuscripts, so this feels like a good outcome.
Box Three
Some small card boxes of new one inch screws. A thoughtful 'remember me' gift from a former girlfriend which had been sent to me unannounced at my new address the Christmas after we broke up. It was a finely sculpted wooden head on a stand, designed to take a pair of reading glasses. Cute, but completely forgotten. It was still in the padded bag it had arrived in and a handwritten note "Good luck in your new life x." I felt sad, pleased to be away from that, and disappointed in myself that I had carried the object and the associated negative karma of it around in my life for the subsequent seven years. Next to this another envelope containing an almost new looking set of souvenir postcards from a visit to Uzbekistan that I had made 22 years before! This was a total surprise.
I could not remember buying them or perhaps having been given them by my hosts for that trip. A box of marbles from my own childhood. A wooden chest containing an old pub game and which I remembered buying in a beautiful antique shop on a sunny day in Monmouth four years ago. I bagged up the love gift, the marbles and the pub game and placed them in a pile for the charity shop, our goodwill store.
Going through just these three boxes took me almost an hour. I calculate that more than two thirds of the stuff within the boxes, by volume, was binned. The pens can be used by the library staff and the rest goes to have a new life via the charity shop. When I saw the note with the wooden gift I didn't cry, but I was upset and sad. Sad that something once so good and joyful did not last. Upset that I had hung onto an item knowing I would never use it, believing since opening it that I would have returned it to her, yet consciously allowing it to take up physical space, less aware of the subtle emotional toll."
What are you hoarding?
by admin | Mar 24, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Love can take you unawares and sometimes at the very moment that you imagine it will never happen! Love is a wonderful tease when she wants to be and will make your heart race when you would expect it to be steady, or to leap when you thought it would simply stroll!
The best way to attract anything is actually just to be you, to do what pleasures, supports, strengthens and satisfies you. Too many opinions tell us that you want to be a certain way, or follow a trend or a fashion. Since when was it right to be something and someone you are not? No. Stick with being the amazing, wonderful, special person that is you and see what you attract.
Look at what makes you the person who is you. Consider the interests, the passions, the hobbies and the pastimes that give you joy and satisfaction. Are you working in the role that is right for you and realizing the chance to share yourself with the world in a way that reflects your own skills and interests? If someone who did not know you, and who had never met you, were to turn up at your home and look around the space that is yours, what would they see that is an image of you living the life that is meant to be yours? Would they discover a person who is engaged in fulfilling activity and spending their hours in activities that are truly them? Or would they see a sort of "One day I'll do this or do that. Perhaps I might someday follow my heart and do what really motivates and thrills me. But not right now, maybe when the timing is right."
Go through the rooms of your home and look at the clutter and junk that might be preventing life from jumping right in. How much unnecessary 'stuff' have you been hoarding and hanging onto in case it does eventually come back into fashion or have a purpose? Spring clean your house even if it is the middle of winter. Get rid of the things that bring neither function nor beauty of form into your living space.
You will draw to you people and experiences that are in harmony with the message that you are sending out from the core of your being. So it is with love. Your own attractor factor is the measure of the energy level that is about you. Work on enhancing your energy because that is what you want to do or because it simply feels right to do, and not for some exterior prompting or suggestion.
Don't wait in for love to come calling. Instead fill your days with activities that fulfill you and by being around people who make your spirit soar.
Love and spirited friendship will knock on your door and ask to be let in because you are open to this delicious opportunity yourself.
