The Ultimate Zen of Enlightened Detachment
The Zen state of enlightened detachment from your stuff makes organization possible. Detachment can save you money and clear the way for the most effective use of a professional organizer’s particular set of skills. One of the biggest impediments to a client diving into the organizing pool by themselves is that they can get caught in a riptide of worry and run out of energy before they swim free.
If you pull everything out of a closet in a burst of late-night enthusiasm, the coming dawn will often find you worn out and too discouraged to continue. It’s not that you don’t have the physical strength for the task. It is the enormous drain on your psychic strength that eventually saps your will to proceed. As we all know, when there isn’t the will, there isn’t a way.
Organizing Cost Savings
Clients often ask me how they can reduce the cost of my services. I always tell them the simple truth.
The most cost-effective step a client can take when hiring a professional organizer is to pull up a comfortable chair, open a closet or grab a pile of clothes, and begin to detach. You begin with the physical action of sorting through that pile of clothes. But, what you are really doing is establishing the mental strength and psychological resolve to enable that sorting.
Those people who are not attached to their possessions don’t have an appreciation for how emotionally difficult this process can become. You’re not just parting with possessions you are parting with physical representations of memories.
That closet stuffed to the rafters with unopened boxes of brand-new shoes or that sweater you wore to the prom 20 years ago are there for a reason. You’ve decided, whether consciously or not, that adding things to the top of the pile is easier than deciding what should be in the pile.
Enlightened Detachment
The Zen of enlightened detachment process begins to free you from the psychological burden of too much stuff. The process of detachment is blindingly obvious yet incredibly difficult. Pick up each piece, one-by-one, think about it for a second, or a minute, or an hour—whatever it takes–and put it down in one of three piles: 1) I’m one with this and I’m keeping it, 2) I am so done with this, it now lives only in the detach pile, and 3) I’m definitely not one with this, but maybe I’m two or three, let me meditate on this.
Often it is mentally much easier if you think of the detach pile as a donate pile rather than a throw pile. After all, some of the items in the detach pile might still be worn by someone or productively turned into potholders or quilts. If you can give your used clothing or goods to the local church or a charitable organization, it often makes it much easier to part with the item.
Burn Out Dangers
You can wait for the professional to start this process. Often a professional can give you the mental energy required to make these critical decisions. Sometimes people get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. Many times, I’ve seen people start pulling everything out of a closet with a burning enthusiasm only to find the fires burn out after a giant pile of stuff is covering the bed and they end up sleeping on the couch for a month. We’ll all had those closets full of stuff we’re going to sort through—except we can’t get to the closet because of all the boxes piled against the door.
If you can start, even if you can only take the step of throwing out actual trash mixed in with the clothes, that starts the mental process of detachment. This makes my organizing job more cost-effective for you and allows me to focus on putting things into a beautiful and efficient space rather than just getting the door closed on the mess.
Would you like a discount on my services? Start with three little piles and watch the savings add up.
