What To Do When You Can’t Think Straight

I recently had a discussion with a client about this topic and I think the ideas talked about would make a good basic list I’d like to share with you so here goes:

1 Clear the physical clutter

Let go of the old to make some physical and psychic space for yourself. Tidy up and rearrange neatly the stuff you DO want to keep. Sounds so obvious but it really does make a difference in the energy and how you feel straightaway. Aim to make your immediate environment beautiful, peaceful and uplifting – don’t allow anything else in your sacred space.

2 Clear mental clutter

by writing down a stream of consciousness – the “Morning Pages” of “The Artist’s Way” book. Write 3 pages of thoughts without censoring or abbreviating anything. Do this once a day or at ad hoc moments when you are feeling particularly confused. Continue reading »

How Many Projects Do You Have Right Now?

As you may know I have been working my way towards a clean studio and tying up loose ends. I’m aiming for one current creative project and one box of materials and resources that goes with it. This sounds extreme. Damn, even I think it’s extreme but I want to at least aim for it even if I don’t reach it. One of the things that GTD method of organising advocates is to collect together all your unfinished business to see how big your backlog is and then start dealing with it bit by bit. I haven’t really followed this method to the letter but I have written off a load of hypothetical things I was going to do one day. Now that that is out of the way, I am slowly working through all the things that I want to finish off. Here is the current list: Continue reading »

What to do with Nostalgic Clutter

Grandmother's box of tricks

My mother has given me an old brown-paper covered box full of beautifully stitched textiles that were made by my great grandmother and another lady when they were children. The kinds of things that children were made to do to practise their skills in darning, cross-stitch, crochet and making clothes. I’ve also inherited a fabric covered box full of old needles, crochet hooks, press studs and other bits and pieces from an old fashioned sewing box - all saved by my grandmother during WWII. Although I think there is an inherent beauty and nostalgia in these objects, if I had seen them in a shop I wouldn’t be beating down a path to the till. I feel caught in a limbo of being attached to something full of historical value through their age and personal connection to my heritage and my desire to live in the now and not be tied to the past. Still I can’t seem to bear to part with them. No-one else in our family is interested in them. They are just lying in a drawer never seeing the light of day. So what to do with them? Continue reading »

The Onion of Clutter

Ok well deleting all the emails in my inbox didn’t quite go according to plan. I think I managed to delete about 20 in the end – the reason being most of them need an action of some kind. And a lot of them need an action which is rather time consuming – e.g. saving all the attached images and text and uploading them to this website and checking that things are working as they should etc etc. Now you can see why I only damn well deleted 20 ok? I am sure there must be a way to save images from an email in MS Outlook in one go instead of having to do them painstakingly one by one. If anyone knows of one please could you let me know? Continue reading »

Digital Serenity

My digital clutter clear is going well – if rather time-consuming. I needed to go through rakes of emails to pull out some addresses I didn’t want to lose.  I have finally got my email folders down to 4  from about 100 and now to tackle the inbox of about 180 messages – most of which will be deleted tonight! I am sorry to say that I fell badly into this category Digital Packrat. The relief from deleting most of those emails was palpable. I have kept a few by saving them as text files. I found out that if you highlight all the emails at once and then do ‘Save As’ you can save them all in one text file.  If and when I want to look at them again I can open them in Notepad and just do a search for a relevant word. That way they take up only a tiny amount of space. How cool is that?

Other digital clutter clearing in the pipline is to continue deleting software that I only use occasionally if ever.  For example software that came with my phone to enable the transfer of music and pictures was installed when I first got it and that’s it. I’ve realised it’s just not part of my way of doing things to listen to music on my phone or use my phone for photography – so what’s the point of having software installed that does all that?

Now to the really hard bit Continue reading »

Clarity Breeds Serenity & Other Things Too!

Now that my mass clutter clearing has moved forward with several bags going to charity the last couple of weekends and various plastic toys and art materials going to the little people - my studio is looking a thousand times better. There are no loose papers lying around. Amazing eh? It feels strange. It feels different. Sometimes the emotional side of clutter clearing can get to you. Sometimes being clear can bring peace but it can also bring a feeling of being so shiny and new that it hurts. It’s almost like being scrubbed clean can leave you stinging for a while before you get used to it. Empty spaces can feel vast and uncomfortable and well as clean and zen-peaceful. After a while though I noticed that I started to get energy to clear other things too.  Continue reading »

How Big Should a Stash Be?

I just read this interesting article about fabric stashes and there are some conflicting views on there about what is acceptable and what isn’t. I don’t agree that all scraps are clutter – quite the opposite – they can be really interesting and give rise to new ideas and things to make with them. Although I do agree that scraps have the potential to become clutter if you don’t do anything with them – also they can be a sign of having a fear of lack because you can’t bear to part with them. Continue reading »

The 5 C’s of Small Is Beautiful

I have recently returned from a jolly jaunt in Shropshire spent in our (new to us) caravan. At last I fulfilled my long held dream of having a caravan and some of the things that attract me about caravans (apart from the lack of mud and cold you get when camping!) are you can only take a small number of possessions with you and those said possessions have to be important ones; ones that have the most meaning and usefulness. There is no room for crap and clutter. How brilliant! I love the idea of being able to look around the space and take in everything I own in one sweep of the eye (well, nearly). Deciding what to take into the van was a great exercise in focus – what do I really, really want around me? I know it was only for a week but this exercise has great value for every day life whether on holiday or not.  Some friends of ours are planning to live on a narrow boat soon and they will be going through the same process. Everything they own will be reviewed for it’s usefulness, value and meaning. To simplify your life, reduce the space you live in. It seems obvious when you say it like that. Countless times people say the larger the house they have the more clutter they collect. The larger the handbag you carry around the more junk you take with you etc etc. Things expand to fit the space allowed to them. My studio seems to attract junk like a magnet – it’s the largest room in the house and it’s the place where people put stuff when they don’t know what else to do with it. In a small space like a caravan, a studio flat or a boat you are forced to deal with what is in front of you immediately. You can’t have stuff lying around – it’s just not possible. It makes you face up to your life and deal with your own shit – literally! The idea of an overflowing chemical toilet is not an appealing one! Continue reading »

Project Drag – What To Do?

Robin posted a nice response to my post on Keep it Fresh. Yes, well I can really relate to having projects that seem to lose their energy but because we have invested so much into them already we are loathe to get rid of them despite the negative feelings associated with them. These projects can weigh us down and keep us feeling guilty and perhaps ashamed for many reasons. Our critical minds can use them as evidence of our so-called lack of discipline, laziness, overspending and overstretching. Sometimes when looking at these long-in-the-tooth projects all we can see is what is wrong with them and how we could have done them better and how we failed to give enough energy and resources into finishing them. This can lead to a real self-flagellation fest. 

So what to do?

Throw away your birch and declare yourself free.

Tell yourself you have a choice about this project – you have a choice about how to respond to it and whether to finish it or not. Tell yourself that you are going to decide now what response you are going to have to this project. Evaluate your response – how do you feel? Bypass the brain – use your guts. Weigh up how much joy you are receiving from this project now – regardless of how you felt about it in the past. Does it inspire you now? Does it make you feel excited now? Does it make you feel curious about where you could take it in an experimental, playful kind of way? Probably not otherwise it wouldn’t be clutter but reviewing it again might reawaken those feelings. I said “might”! I suggest only deciding to finish projects that do hold joyful feelings for you. Sometimes when reviewing something after a long while the negative feelings that caused it to grind to a halt have dissipated and there’s a feeling of “it’s not so bad after all, in fact it’s quite good. Yeah that was cool, I would like to get into that again”.  However, if this isn’t the case, ask yourself why would you want to put yourself through gritting your teeth to complete something?

Set Your Intentions

So if you decide to finish it (joyfully) then set your intention and make whatever preparations are necessary such as making a list of actions, gathering materials and so on. Focus in on the idea of finishing this project and mentally set aside time to do this. Intentionally allow it a space in your creative throughput. When are you going to spend time on it? Tonight? This weekend? Act quickly to follow through on this intention. Don’t wait. Remember keep it fresh!

Extract The Lesson Before You Dump

If you feel that the negative vibes are predominant then ask yourself what benefit these feelings are giving you? Do you still want to hold onto those feelings? What lesson can you learn from this project? The answers maybe many and varied, perhaps you learned something about techniques, about the way you work, about what you like and don’t like, about your own style. Is the concept good but the implementation not how you wanted? Is the idea worth expressing again but with fresh materials? What are the good things, the nuggets of learning to take with you before you let go of this project? How will this inform the way you create in the future? For example some of the things I have learned about my unfinished projects are pertinent to my working style. Forcing myself to work in a planned, staged way doesn’t suit me. I much prefer working in a fast, spontaneous manner. I find it hard to plan out my work and complete stages in a set order where it’s hard to see the end result and a lot of careful strategic planning is involved in getting layers in the right place for example. Other people might find this an absolute pleasure and love it. Each to his or her own. I find it much harder to finish projects when I move away from my natural working patterns so now I avoid techniques that call for this kind of work and I look for ways to produce a similar result but working in a way I enjoy; retaining a certain level of spontaneity.

Dump or Share.

Once you’ve decided to dump a project you may find it a real wrench to actually do it but the feeling of freedom afterwards is great.  If you don’t feel like dumping them in the trash then give them away to fellow artists or others (I have noticed a lot of kids like receiving bits and pieces of unfinished work – bless ‘em). Or do a swap. There are loads of groups on the net where people send swap parcels to each other. And while you are at it what about swapping some of those unused materials you’ve had lurking around for eons? One woman’s ugly UFO (unfinished object) is someone else’s treasured find. When someone else sees our work they don’t have all the self-criticism feelings attached to it that we have. They are much more open to feeling the original spark and imagination that created it.

Transform and Recycle

If you still want to hold onto the project because it has some merit but you don’t want to actually finish it as originally planned then you can change the way you view it by transforming your response and transforming the object itself. Here are some ideas on reframing:

• Imagine that you are looking at your work through the eyes of a compassionate and kindly friend or advisor. You are mentally separate from the creator i.e. yourself and you are looking in on her thinking processes with curiosity. What advice or encouragement will you give to the creator of this work? What can you tell her that will help her to see the work differently? What compassionate comments do you have about her not finishing this work?
• Turn the work on it’s side, top or any other which way that wasn’t originally intended. Turn it over, does the back or the inside look interesting? Does that give you some new way of viewing it that would move things forward?
• Take a frame of some kind – it could be an actual picture frame, a piece of card with a hole in of any shape, some wire, or any other filter such as a piece of coloured glass or cellophane, some lace or tree branches. Hold these over the work, how does it pique your interest? Can you perhaps permanently reframe the work in some new way now that you have viewed it differently?
• Can it be shredded, burned, crushed, mixed, embellished, painted, cut up and reformed or any other process you can imagine to change it’s nature and make it into something else? Can parts of it be saved and other parts discarded? Can some of it be applied to different surfaces or used in something else entirely new? Remember energy cannot be destroyed only transformed. I especially like the “destructive” processes of transformation here such as shredding and slashing because they can so easily free up the original energy that went into the work. It’s no longer set in stone weighing us down, it becomes lighter and more fluid and from there on it’s easier to either throw it out or make it into something else. It’s a bit like having a hair perm. You have to apply chemicals to the hair to loosen and jiggle around those hair particles before they can be reset into a new pattern. So ask yourself how can I jiggle around the energy of this thing to make it more interesting, more fun, more what I want it to be?
• Failing all that – can the stuff be recycled either as rags, tryout materials, padding or insulation, fuel or raw materials for something else?

Is Clutter Clearing Always a Positive Experience?

When planning to do some clutter clearing I always get a tingly feeling of anticipation. The anticipation of feeling focussed, lighter, clearer, better, freer afterwards. Those are the rewards I look forward to. But is clutter clearing always so positive? Are there any downsides to it?

Watching the awful news about the cyclone in Burma got me thinking. These people have had clutter clearing enforced on them in a double whammy. Firstly millions of people have lost nearly all, if not all of their worldly possessions along with their livestock, family members and livelihoods. This is “clutter clearing” of the most extreme kind. The kind of earth-shattering blow that asks the recipient to practise non-attachment on the highest level while they scrabble to survive. A severe and sudden lesson to be sure. How many of us could accept this with grace especially in Western society where the ownership and acquisition of physical possessions is very much encouraged? Following on from this there is another kind of “clutter” – the debris from cyclone damage is immense and the clearing up operation can take years of hard work – how can one go about clearing and rebuilding when loved ones have just died?

Which brings me onto my next point. When clearing clutter all kinds of painful memories and emotional attachments are suddenly activated. This can be extremely uncomfortable. I have watched de-junk your life programs on TV where the person whose house was being de-junked spent most of their time either in floods of tears or feeling angry with the de-cluttering coach for forcing them to make decisions they would rather not make. It can be scary and disorientating to get rid of clutter. We are so used to mapping out our environments using our stuff as landmarks that when it’s gone we can feel empty, unnerved and vulnerable. Of course these are all signs that the process is working but let’s not pretend that it’s always a wonderfully uplifting experience. Sorting through your own shit can be downright painful. One has to face up to all the things you have been hiding from. And what is left at the end of it? That is the really scary part. What is the truth? What are the vital elements we want to keep in our lives? Can they stand up to scrutiny or are we happier living in our own cosy delusions of clutter and what we feel it does for us? Knowing who and what we truly are and then arranging our environment around that Knowing is powerful medicine but you might need a spoon of sugar to make it go down!

How to make clutter clearing a bit easier: Continue reading »