Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
More than a Feeling
Early in my career as an organizer, I was given an amazing compliment. A client and I had been diligently working on her apartment, room by room, cabinet by cabinet, emptying, discarding, reordering. Most of our work had been deep under the surface. Her surfaces were hardly minimalist, but they were very artistic and we left them pretty much unchanged.
A few months into our work she and her daughter had a tea party for Valentine’s Day. One of the other mothers looked around quizzically and said, “What did you change? Something is different.”
Yes, something was different. Call it feng shui, call it energy, when you let go of stuff, even stuff that is stuffed in a closet, your space feels different. I was gratified by the fact that someone could sense the difference, and it inspired my client.
It’s like when you eat an apple instead of a muffin. You don’t loose weight right that second, but you feel different, and that feeling can motivate more change.
It’s easy to see how a person might feel different when they let go of stuff and create order in their closets, but it is a bit more of a leap to say the room feels different—and yet it happens. So often I go into homes and offices and there are storage spaces that have become dead. They are so full that it is too hard to use them and so the client has just moved on. They buy Container Store wardrobes when the closet is too full and Rubbermaid bins when the file cabinet is overflowing. Even if the overflow is tucked away and not an eyesore, the dead space feels dead. It is a blockage, a clot in your home, and it feels that way.
When you clear out these blockages, when you weed and reorganize to make functioning storage spaces, you are getting rid of stagnation and it is noticeable. Sometimes bigger changes happen organically, because once the client and I have started weeding, it suddenly becomes apparent that some stopgap measure (like plastic drawers under the bed because the dresser was too full) is no longer necessary. It can go. And what started out as an attempt to fit the clothes that were always on the window seat into the dresser ends up as six bags of clothes and four plastic drawers for Goodwill. Or maybe those drawers can be repurposed for hats and scarves in the coat closet… the possibilities are endless.
Sometimes clients want to work on something “showy,” something that is going to remind them that I was there and we accomplished something. But never underestimate how good even the most mundane organizing tasks can make you and your home feel.