Physical and metaphorical clutter

The past few days have been all about ridding my life of clutter, both in the physical sense and the mental/emotional sense.

We moved into our house a couple of years ago. At the time, we unpacked and set up everything except for a few boxes. We weren't sure if the stuff in those boxes should go into the basement or into the garage.....so, since the move-in date, the boxes sat in our garage---opened, since we do use the stuff in there on a semi-regular basis. But the fact that these things did not have a proper home silently drove me nuts. It was always in the back of my mind that finding a home for these things (and ORGANIZING them) needed to be done, but I never made the time to do so. And so the thought just nagged, nagged, nagged at me. Yesterday, I finally decided to tackle the project. The boxes were finally unpacked, the items organized and placed in the basement. I still have to organize the garage space where these boxes sat, but you have no idea how relieved I am that this simple organizational task is finally done. It is a huge weight off my shoulders, even though it is not fully done.

In a similar vein, today I spent some time responding to emails and doing some really easy tasks that I had been putting off, unnecessarily, for a while. It bothered me that I was putting them off, and yet I still procrastinated. And I felt the same sort of palpable relief when the tasks were finished.

I don't often think about all of the "mental clutter" that I allow into my life. I am so good about ridding myself of the physical clutter (my desk is always neat and I am always filing things away....Clean Sweep will not be showing up at my house, thank you very much!), yet I allow this mental clutter to clog my life and sap my energy. It took all of 30 seconds to do the tasks I've been avoiding and all of 5 minutes to respond to the emails. So why did I put them off for so long?

I hope that I remember this feeling the next time I put off a simple task....and I hope I can be better about reducing ALL of the clutter in my life.