Clutter Busting Your Life

After many hours spent clutter busting with clients and responding to emails sent by the readers of his first book, Brooks Palmer realized that many people were curious about some of the deeper manifestations of clutter—how it crowds the mind and thought processes and how it can even interfere with relationships. Although this distracting bulk never serves us, it can provide the illusion of insulation from our essential fragility, a quality that Brooks sees as essential to existence but also the root of many futile efforts to build power that would obscure it. Alas, these tricks never work, but the clarity of awareness can prevent the clutter-building part of us to learn to appreciate space not as void, but as a life-giving resource that renews us. Brooks illustrates these points through anecdotes, gentle discussions, and abstract jokes and cartoons, never forcing the reader to accept his thesis but prodding the subconscious with subtle suggestions that bring about deep change with the absence of blame. In Western society, we’ve accepted that more is always better, and our houses and garages, basements and storage lockers, are jammed with things we never use but feel we need to hang onto until some future event will prove their usefulness, or because they were valuable to someone we loved (or hated). Brooks Palmer’s advice: “cut the crap.” Cut the crap of pretending that we need these things and cut the crap of the way we talk about clutter, both emotional and physical. By clearing physical clutter and acknowledging the lack of inherent value in many of the possessions we cling to, we also learn to cut the crap around relationships and emotions and discover who and what really matters in our lives. For example, if someone hangs on to their great aunt’s bureau, a white elephant but a family heirloom, they may also be hanging on to repressed feelings about their own worth, hoping to demonstrate that they care about family, or tha