Shuffling stuff is making me silly stupid…

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

If my shredding-in-waiting looked like the photo above I’d be a happy camper because that would mean it was actually and already shredded, not waiting to be.  But my shredding-in-waiting is waiting, waiting, waiting…

You see, I have this pile I’ve labeled “shredding”… in it you’ll find all the stuff that needs to be put through the shredder.  The pile grows and grows and I ignore and ignore…

Why not do it a little at a time?  That certainly makes sense but it doesn’t happen.  I even bought a deluxe shredder to eliminate all the jamming hassles of my old one.  Still the pile grows… and somewhere along the way the as-yet-unshredded pile starts falling over and then (maybe) I finally do the deed.

Messes Left in My Wake

I don’t understand this reticence to do something so simple.  I suspect it’s an analogy (stand in) for all the “stuff” (call it “clutter” if you must) that I just don’t want to decide about.  Indecisiveness on steroids.  Making me… silly stupid.

It’s much easier for me to make major life, multi-million dollar decisions, than it is to decide on a carpet for my front porch. That’s the truth.

— Oprah Winfrey

Let’s face it, there’s plenty of stuff we know we should abandon, stuff we should shred or, at the very least, get rid of, discard, give away, hasta la vista, baby! But right now all my stuff seems to just be sitting in messy piles, waiting…

Even when I’m committed to clearing a space, I simply shuffle stuff to somewhere else… as if the decision to put it elsewhere is actually the decision that needs to be made.  But truth be told, the pesky stuff is only moving to a new waiting place.

Ah-ha!  I just realized something important. When I move things out, I do “fix” a space and that part of the process is working just fine. (Slow but fine.) But about those messes I’m leaving in my wake – they end up in the garage, on the bookcases and in the closets as new “piles-in-waiting”.  I need a better, or, at the very least, speedier, process.

As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you – the first time around.

— Oprah Winfrey

Pack Your Bag, Shuffle Your Stuff

An NLP coach once suggested to me that packing my bag for an unknown future would help me learn what I unconsciously already knew: what I packed and what I left behind would provide useful information about my new destination.

NLP promotes a change in how you look at life and how you are in life. The surprising thing is that the resources you need to make these changes are seen as being within the individual.

— NLP Spokane WA

I know it sounds back-ass-ward but it works, really it does.

And thus it occurs to me that the very act of “shuffling stuff” out of a room to a temporary holding place is the first step in deciding – just as “packing my bag” has helped me in the past to suss out my life-path, so too might “shuffling the stuff” help me see what my unconscious already knows: which objects I will need (and should rescue) for my newly-spruced-up life-space.  (And then, Ellie, let’s say hasta la vista to the leftovers!)

It’s Iterative and Irritating!

So perhaps the problem is simply this: for me making choices is an iterative process that eventually yields clarity.  Which means that the new realities I’m ever-so-slowly creating and discovering will reveal themselves in their own time; and until then I would do well to put a brake on my impatience and a pedal to the metal on the Stuff-Shuffle!

So, for now, my solution to my Shredding-in-Waiting problems is to tell myself this:

Contrary to master organizer David Allen’s “touch it once theory”, it’s OK for me to touch “stuff” more than once in order to ultimately know what’s a Keeper and what’s not.

Apparently I’m not the only one who feels justified in touching things more than once.  The Unclutter.com professes to have a “procrastination bin” for such items… and s/he has rules for what can and cannot go in the bin.

On My Way

Despite my impatience, I am encouraged.  I’m beginning to believe that eventually, as I give myself the requisite time-space for this admittedly inefficient process, I’ll have effectively accomplished the following:

• Cleared out a-place-of-their-own for each of my Keepers
• Shown the door to the Not-Keepers
• Put my now-identified Keepers where they belong

And then maybe, just maybe, this dance called the Stuff-Shuffle can cease and desist.  Or, at the very least, consume less and less of my psyche!

Mexican Shuffle was a turning point of the Tijuana Brass.

— Herb Alpert

Ah, that’s IT!  I should be dancing or, better still, ROFLOL, as I do the Stuff-Shuffle.

Wanna Dance?