hopefully something rhetorical

Christine Kane just posted a great new something to her blog called “56 Things You Can Toss Out Now.” It is a great list of things that you can definitely get rid of, and I particularly like it because she so simply lays out at the start of her list why we hold onto things: love or fear. And, as I was reading through her list, I got hung up on number 26. “The notion that you will ever be one of those moms that makes beautiful scrapbooks.”

I am a closet (literally) scrapbook hoarder. I joke that my hobby is really collecting (and organizing) scrapbooking materials. And, while I have all these materials, I am not actually creating pages. I have ideas, but I always have some excuse that holds me back from taking the next step. And, I have been wondering, lately in particular, if I needed to sell what I have and admit that although I want to scrapbook, I am not ever going to do it. I have been receiving gentle prodding in that direction by others around me too.

But, I am not ready to give up the idea that I can be an academic and a scrapbooker/crafter at the same time, even though I know that this is definitely one of my hang-ups about scrapbooking.  I am reading Ali Edwards’s book called Life Artist, and I am really loving this term right now. I think I like it because it allows all my loves to be “okay.” I can create in my classroom as well as every other medium in my life that I choose. This one term allows for all of my desires to coexist, albeit sometimes very strangely.

This year, we have been doing some major purging like what Christine is talking about. We have been getting rid of the things we don’t absolutely love, and I have been trying to get rid of the stuff that I am keeping because of fear. Fear someone will be upset if “it” is not on my wall, fear that “it” will never fit again, fear that I can’t believe I spent so much money on “it,” or whatever. But, as we are clearing more and more out, I am not feeling better, as I had hoped that I would. For me, I think that I need to take the step and actually clear out the mental clutter, keeping only what I love. This is the same discussion that I hear everywhere right now. I keep reading about the idea that you have to let go of what is holding you down, just forget about it. But, the light bulb moment happened for me as I got to #26 on Christine’s list of things to toss.  This thing was an attitude or a belief on a  list of physical things to pitch.

What I need to toss right now is not physical. I can completely empty my house, and I am still not going to feel the way I want to feel until I get rid of the mental clutter that is clouding up my energy. I have come to terms with the need to get rid of my physical clutter, but my brain has been like a cluttered hard drive on a computer for far too long. I think that this is the core of what I keep seeing discussed, in whatever format it takes at the moment. You are only going to be successful when you keep the thoughts that you love and think the thoughts that are going to help bring you what you desire. It is really just the law of attraction boiled down. I have to clear out the mental clutter I am keeping, and I have to deal with the fact that I am afraid of what I will have to admit if I give it up.

So, I have decided that I am not ready to toss our my scrapbooking aspirations yet. But, I do realize that if I want to be the life artist I really want to be, I have to realize that it is the mental clutter that is holding me back in all my life’s mediums (ie: It isn’t perfect, so no one will want it. The things I create won’t be good enough. I am going to mess it up. The act of creating is a waste of time when I have other things I should be doing). These are all the thoughts that are going to have to be put aside in order to succeed at this goal.

I mean since I got the new sewing machine, that I love more than other any crafting tool I could ever imagine, I have been creating lots more. So, I know that having the tools I need to create what I want to create is the first step. I have actually known that the tools matter for me for quite some time and already give myself the tools I need to make the task of teaching easier to manage. So, now it is time to clean out all the clutter, mental and physical, and take the next step towards creating the life I desire in a fuller sense.

Amazing how perfectly this goes along with my word for the year!