Mental Decluttering

   There has been a recent trend in what's called "decluttering", which we can see in Mary Kondo and other experts in the field of Feng Shui. There is something refreshing, at least to my thinking about how we periodically declutter our apartments and houses, about the idea of getting rid of old things in order to make way for the new. But can we also mentally declutter?

   I think the more interesting question is to ask: is there a relationship between what we have and what we think? Can the contents of our mind be affected by our possessions? Knowing that we have a lot of things in our cupboards taking up space can also create an unnecessary burden on the mind. The more we have to take care of, the more cares we tend to have. It's as though the corners of our mind get cobwebbed with the accumulation of ideas.  Perhaps we even subconsciously associate clutter with some kind of unfinished business that needs to be resolved or sorted out.

   Having things means identifying with them. For every book I have, there is a hidden story pertaining to what the book means to me and where I got it from. Some books have been read and absorbed years ago, and there is no intention whatsoever of rereading them. Others become useful reference tools. The point is that we need to figure out which of these are just holdovers from a previous time that we don't want to let go of, and which are truly needed today. I book I cherished many years ago, a movie I enjoyed as a child, or something that moved me when I am young may have less meaning and relevance today. Sometimes the process of decluttering means to honestly reappraise what is meaningful for me today, knowing that my sense of self is continually changing and being reconstructed.

    Decluttering reminds me that even though we might like to have possessions, most of our possessions fall into disuse. They gather dust eventually and may even sit in our closet for years without being used. The nature of desire is that we see new things as though they will always look and feel new. But what we don't realize is that this sense of novelty--the brightness we experience when seeing something new--is actually a reflection of awareness itself. This awareness can be found at every moment, if only we did not attach to objects of any kind and were able to see the luminosity, that sense of lightness and ease the comes from not attaching or taking anything as an external object that exists separately from mind. It's only because we are habituated to seeing things based on our previous memories that we become addicted to "new" things, and this results in more accumulation of things.