Not every space is an invitation to fill it.
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself the permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I Am Making Space.”
Life ebbs and flows, even the scariest parts end, and even the crazy parts close to home and out there in the angry world, pass. But all the while, even when one drama burns its way through your attention span, you somehow become desensitised, while anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop. And in all this, your prospects, your attitude and your mood swings like a pendulum between joy and sorrow, anxiety and peace, between vitality and the edge of burnout.
Your phone buzzes and chimes at you with notifications, nagging you to return to the world of virtual synthetic connection. You busy yourself scrolling, liking, commenting, sharing, and taking in a firehose of virtual experience all the time, without any of the counterbalancing firmness of a lived experience to anchor all that virtual experience in. This is why anyone, young people especially, can get so wired from their addictions to their phones, YouTube, streaming and their online games—because the deluge of virtual experience so far out of balance with lived experience overloads the human brain and nervous system.
The magic missing ingredient is integration. There is no possible way you could be integrating all the stuff you take in. Integration requires space.
Your desk perhaps is cluttered, or your car may be cluttered, or your fridge, or all of them. Your world is cluttered.
“Clutter is nothing more than postponed decisions.”
Barbara Hemphill
Your mind and your heart, are disorganised piles of worries, concerns, intentions and to-do lists that can simply overwhelm you. And when any of us feel overwhelmed we look for distraction. We shape our environments and then our environments shape us.
Yoga, meditation and breathwork are great for creating a sense of presence, but when that bubble dissolves, and you have to move about in your world again, the practice ends up being nothing more than a temporary reprieve from the onslaught of noise and clutter.
Clutter can be physical, mental, psychological, or virtual. Even acts of personal care that you put off, manifest as a kind of clutter—little aches and pains, stiffness and soreness that you are actually your body simply asking you to stop for a moment and invest your energy and attention to its needs.
Clutter, of every kind, has a way of making you feel anxious, because everything that isn’t in its place, or taken care of, keeps nagging at your attention, and if your world is cluttered, your attention will be nagged at by everything and your nervous system is kept in a state of perpetual arousal. The worst outcome is that you become so used to the level of arousal that your nervous system simply adapts and becomes numb to all the stimuli. And then, you need more intense stimulus to get any kind of arousal. This is the pathway to impulsive, addictive and destructive relationships with the things you should have every reason to enjoy and appreciate for the sake of recreation and pleasure. And then you feel shame and guilt about your relationship with pleasure and recreation.
SO WHAT DO I DO?
Make Space.
The simplest answer is to pick one room a day and declutter it. Or even one small space, like your car or your desk.
Start making peace with throwing things away. If it is not adding to your, it does not belong in your life. How can you possibly make room for something new to come into your life, if your physical and virtual hallways are cluttered with noise? How can you sit with spacious expansive ideas if the hands of your mind are full of everything you already struggle to carry?
I like to point out to my patients and clients, how cluttered their virtual interface is. Take a look at your phone. How many Facebook groups and pages are you subscribed to? How many Whatsapp group chats are you in that you don’t actually care about, and do not add to your day, or make you come alive by engaging in them? How many accounts are you “following” on Instagram simply because you haven’t invested the energy into housekeeping?
You shape your environment, and your environment shapes you.
You won’t believe how cathartic it is to leave groups, to spend an hour unsubscribing from emails, unfollowing, removing apps from your phone, and turning off notifications for things that are non-essential.
TAKE HOME/PRACTICE
CLEARING YOUR CACHE - AN EVERYDAY ANYTIME PRACTICE
One mini-practice I love to recommend is called “Clearing Your Cache”. This is the small grounding breath, the tactical pause, the clearing of the ‘browser cache’ of your emotions, the ‘dropping-in’ to your body, just for a moment, so that the momentum and tension of yesterday do not bleed into today. So that the energy of the last moment that derailed you, does not derail the unfolding moment that is arriving. You can do this stuck in traffic, in the eye of the storm of an argument, between meetings, and right in the middle of cooking or even eating dinner. You are never poorer for taking that one brief moment and making space.
Just be like this today.
Since this is a weekend edition of Just Be Like This Today!, you might have the appetite for a more expansive practice.
Invest a little energy and attention today, as you move through your world, you do not need to solve everything, just put away one thing where it belongs. Just throw away the one thing instead of walking past. Just unsubscribe from one email instead of just deleting it. Leave the one group chat, and unfollow one account instead of just scrolling past. Delete one app from your phone.
Remove one thing from your fridge. Unsubscribe from one streaming service that presents the least value in your life. Practice makes progress. All the little rituals we can fold into our life, like changing the toilet paper roll, taking out the bins, folding a shirt—these can be in the way, or they can become the way we belong to our lives.
Make Space.
A ‘world’ is nothing more than ‘a place in time’, —‘a moment of space’
This is YOUR ‘world’.
The sense of personal care you invest in it, and in yourself will begin to show. You can become the interior decorator of your world. This is a very infectious idea, and once you start, it can become landslide towards a kind of minimalism, not the kind of having no stuff, or a living room that looks like it belongs in an Icelandic architect’s wet dream, but where whatever you do see or touch, or are touched by daily, as you move through your world, means something to you. To live in a space that you have curated with care, where more of what defines that space is something you have a connection to, is how you build a sense of deep belonging to your world.
This is your home—a World of your own.
Just be like this today!
If this post resonates with you and you are looking for a more direct application of this Living Wisdom, or a more tailored approach to effective practices, the other half of my day job is meeting with people and helping them apprentice themselves to their own life: Schedule a Call
—Everything is Waiting for You.