Clutter

I'm currently sitting in my new apartment adorned with boxes stifled with an assortment of junk. I know I have to face these things and unpack them and compartmentalize most of these things in some form of order and throw out the rest, but I can't bring myself to do it. At least not yet. Call it laziness which it most likely is, but I saw it asn an interesting metaphor (yes, this is one of THOSE blogs).

As a writer there's a lot of junk up in my head that hasn't been unpacked yet. It's been here for a few days, for a few moments, for many years. Ideas that haven't been fully formed yet or fully transferred onto the page, to serve as a means of actually DOING something. I think this is true for everyone. We all have our own junk, our own issues, our own obsessions that we just sort of box up for the time being, to unpack later on in life. The more we box things up, the tighter our space gets and the less comfortable we become, unable to move as freely as we once were.

The process of unpacking these thoughts, of giving light to a lot of the clutter we chose not to face for the longest time isn't the most fun of experiences. Most times there are good reasons for boxing up the clutter, reasons that we don't want to have to acknowledge but that exist nonetheless.

The more my apartment becomes furnished and in a sense evolves into a more idealized state, the more I think about the boxes, still sitting there in the corner of my apartment, building dust. I get transfixed on how nice the apartment is becoming WITHOUT those things, how a lot of my "valuables" there are negligible, how I really don't want to deal with all that junk that I collected at the old apartment. I think of throwing them out, living off of what already is in here.

But then I realize that that isn't necessarily true. I take comfort in those boxes, of knowing that if I ever one day will need something from my old apartment, from my old life, they will always be there. As long as I don't touch them or move them elsewhere; as long as I don't open them to really look inside. At least not yet. Not until I really NEED to. There's a comfort there.

That comfort though is a bit superficial. It only represses the needs we all need to acknowledge, the fears we all have to face. We can look at how nice things may look right now around us, or how terrible they are in front of us, but these things will always be with us unless we unpack them, compartmentalize them. Open up their boxes and allow them to be free to be stored and used or trashed in ways that free up more space, so we don't carry so much weight in our day.

This would liberate ourselves into making a more realized life, one that can balance the idealized perspective with reality; a counter-weight for our dreams to keep us grounded.