Mrs Metaphor

I had this thought today in the shower because that is where I do the most profound thinking these days…

It’s a stream of conciousness so jump in a boat and hang on, yes? It starts like this: if I had a smaller house it would be cleaner…well, maybe not…if I had a smaller house and less stuff it would be cleaner…or at least it would be less cluttered….or maybe it’s a small house that has big closets…then, in theory I would have more stuff but I could hide it in the closets and thus my house would LOOK cleaner and less cluttered but then, I’d be afraid of my closets.

This led me to start thinking about the things I really do have in my closets and in the case of “storage” closets, why I have these things at all? The last time we moved we did pair it down but it seems that “storage items” are like expandable foam when left unattended. Any space left in the storage area becomes filled with no further explanation.

For a while we considered renting a “storage unit” in town for some of the items that no longer needed to be “on site” as it were. Our thinking at the time ran this way…we still want it, we don’t “need” it, or at least we don’t need immediate access to it so why don’t we get it an apartment of it’s own? Thankfully, we decided against this.

Because I AM Mrs Metaphor I thought I would draw this out a little and see how it applies to my life in a more than physical way. Indulge me for a moment.

What comes to me is this idea that the less I hang on to, clutter-wise the more space I have, regardless of my current capacity. I think through the things in my life that I hang on to…the clutter, the unneeded, the unwanted, the irrelevant, the unhealthy, perhaps even the baggage handed down from generation to generation taking up space in the attic, the closets, the basement. I imagine being able to take those things and remove them, like removing old files from a harddrive. What I’ve done is to make space, yes?

Becoming “poor in spirit”perhaps does not fit here exactly but I like to think the metaphor holds some merit even so. The more spriritual or emotional space I create in my own self the more able I am to serve others, to shoulder a little of their burden and when the time comes, perhaps help them purge as well so that perhaps the kingdom of heaven might belong to us after all…and then we’d actually have room for it.