Decluttering My Day

 I am on Joshua Becker's "Becoming Minimalist" email list. I have an on again/off again attitude towards those emails; typically I skim them then delete them. But today's article, 20 "First Step" Decluttering Ideas, caught my eye. True to his style, Becker advocated starting small: Declutter the inside of your car (#1), Clear off your nightstand (#5). Baby steps to encourage the reader to take more steps in simplifying their homes and, more to the point, their lives. 

I have felt worse—increasingly worse—physically lately than I have in a long time. Okay, than I have in years. Warren and I head back to Mayo in June, and of course for now I am continuing treatment, but I have questions and observations growing in my mind. And those questions and observations are touching off issues of decluttering—not of the top of the refrigerator (#10), but of my life.

Back in February, looking at what the spring held for me in Legal Clinic, I identified three major Clinic projects, separate and apart from the ongoing assignment of clients to attorneys, that I wanted to see accomplished. One is done. One is almost done (and will be done as of this Thursday afternoon). The third is on hold at the other end of the collaboration, so there is nothing to do right now. Clinic is, for all practical purposes, decluttered.

I'm deactivating my Medium account as an author, I hope by the end of this week. Will I continue to subscribe to and read Medium? Probably. There are some great voices on it. Will I continue to keep my account open to write? No. Not because I am lazy. Not because I feel inferior to some of those great voices (I mean, it is cool to read Barack Obama). But because there is too little of me and, frankly, this blog suits me and my observations best. (There is an E.B. White quote to that effect about his own essays; he felt he excelled best in that format when he wrote about his small observations about everyday life, but I am not going to search my commonplace books to find it right now. And White wrote beautifully and strongly in many formats despite his self-deprecation.) So this blog will continue; my life is full of small moments.

Deactivating my Medium account will declutter the writing corner of my life. 

Today earlier was brilliantly sunny. I thought about being outside, but kept doing inside things, trying to work through how lousy I felt. At about 1:20 today, I crawled into our bed, shaking and miserable. On waking up some 20 minutes later, I came downstairs and followed through on an email I had sent my friend Cindy in which I said first I "hoped" to get back outside in the sunshine, then added '"I know, I know—I need to get out!" 

And I did go out. Yes, I carried some gardening gloves and clippers with the thought that I would do some early garden work, but I quickly set those down. Our deck furniture is still in wraps, so I sat on the deck itself with my back against the tarped furniture. I added a Zildjian ball cap to shade my eyes. And I started writing (in longhand) this blog while feeling the sun, looking up at the blue sky with its scrim of clouds, listening to the birds.

The notebook in which I keep progress notes (how I feel physically) was the only one I had easily at hand, so I wrote in the back pages of it. The cover of that notebook is titled "Here's To Strong Women" with subtitles under it. One of them is "May We Be Them." As I diminish a bit each day, I wonder whether I am a strong woman by continuing on? Or just a stubborn, nay, foolish one?

Back to Joshua and decluttering. In today's trash were my worn out winter boots (which gave me a severe painful callous that may have to be removed by the podiatrist in all likelihood) and the most aged and worn of my three pairs of Skechers, about the only shoes I wear anymore. "Being frugal is not the same as being cheap," say my favorite frugal YouTubers, Larry and Hope Ware of Under the Median. I had been holding onto the boots, despite their being worn out AND painful to my callous, and the shoes thinking—what? That I'd get "one more winter" out of the boots? Another summer out of the worn out shoes? (To complete the picture, realize that the boots have resided behind a living room chair where I tossed them a few months ago to get rid of them, and the shoes had been stuffed into a too stuffed closet since, oh, maybe last summer?) (#9: Declutter old and unused coats and other items from your coat closet.) 

Putting them in the trash, finally, made me feel I was entitled to take care of my feet. Sometimes I forget that taking care of myself is okay. Sometimes I let my mind get cluttered up with thoughts of I might as well hold onto the bad ones "just in case." Just in case of what? That I need to injure my feet some more? 

Another thought decluttered, along with a bit of our living space.

As I wrote out there on our deck, I filled up on sunshine and bird song. My body relaxed and gained some ground. I had to get up to replace the pen as the first gave out. (This is a household of many pens from conferences and percussion trade shows,; we have pens everywhere. Okay, that is cheap and frugal. But this habit also adds to the stream of waste in the world, so that part is not cool.) My knees, feeling every dislocation from my younger years, every step ever climbed/walked/knelt, let their displeasure be known. When I sat back down, I changed my position and thought about my increasing balance and mobility issues. Some of that upcoming Mayo time is in the Neurology Department, a first. For now, I'm not going to let that clutter my mind.

All things come to an end and so did my time on the deck. As I have been typing this, the sky has gone gray and overcast. But oh, the sun! And the birds! And life. That time outside reset me. So maybe, just maybe, I decluttered some of my soul and my heart for now.