A Cluttered Room is a Sign of….

In the circles of academia that study intelligence, personality traits and such things, a cluttered room is a sign of an highly intelligent individual.  In the Spiritual circles, a clean room is often considered a sign of a focused, enlightened Soul.

What with all the drama going on at work, one of the, I’m going to call them benefits, that I have gained is a bit more time.  This is a good thing, as this is one thing I’ve been lacking, or at least in my perception, I’ve been lacking.  It’s not a lot of time, only one extra day a week, but it’s still time I didn’t have available before.

So, what does one do when they find themselves with a little extra time on their hands?  Most of us have a long list of projects we’d like to get to “someday”.  In my case, many of those projects hinge on at least one other project being completed, before I can start on the ones I really want to do.  In fact, most of my projects hinge on one very specific project being completed before I can really get into them.  That one project….  our home office.

During my available time, not all at once, but slowly, I’ve started to clean the office.  To give you an idea as to what I’m dealing with, if you have ever seen Calypso’s bayou hut in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, that will give you a good idea what I’m dealing with.  Even the idea of starting cleaning the office has been so daunting that I had the perfect excuse… I had no time.  I know the excuse works, it has for years.  At least in my head.

If time was the real problem, I wouldn’t have had a messy room when I was a kid, and I’ve had other times in my life where I’ve had time and not kept up on things.  No, time was never the issue.  It was because I didn’t want to face my deepest emotions.  And that’s what started happening the other day.

While I was picking things up and dusting shelves off I started having flashes, not full memories, just flashes.  Micro instances of time, never enough for me to pick them up, but just enough for me to know that they were there.  Surges of emotions trying to flood to the surface after decades of burying them.  That’s the real reason I never cleaned.  These are things I don’t want to deal with, things I wasn’t ever allowed to deal with as a child.  Things that have formed the very basis of who I thought I was, never allowing me to choose.

I know that the time is now for them to come up.  There is no other.  I cannot continue to harbor them deep inside, festering in a pit trying to destroy the life that my husband and I are trying to create.  But more than that, I cannot keep holding onto the pain for one truly simple reason.  My demand to ignore my space was my form of control to avoid the pain of the control that my family had over me, thereby continuing their control.  My cleaning my space is now my taking back what is mine.  My cleaning my space is me no longer allowing them to control me emotionally any longer.

So now we’re back to our home office.  Cluttered? Definitely.  Intelligent?  That’s not for me to say.  Clean space?  I’m working on it.  Spiritual?  Enlightened?  I’m working on that too.