Despite the fact that I often talk in airy-fairy, follow your intuition, listen to what your gut tells you, cultivate a relationship with your belongings terms, there is an element to all this that’s undeniably grounded in tangibility and quantity.

It goes like this: if you continue to add things into your space and life, without making the time to edit out the extraneous, you are going to end up with a chaotic environment.

It sounds Simple, enough, no? Logically, you all can wrap your heads around that. But in practice, people cannot see this process playing out before their eyes. They’re too busy with their daily routines to notice the calculations, or, should I say additions, that are taking place. And then they wonder why it is that months or years down the road, every corner of their home is overgrown and brimming over with tangles, messes, and clutter.

Think would what happen if you continued to eat, meal after meal, snack after snack, but decided you couldn’t be bothered to take a moment and balance the body scales.

“Uch, I know I really should, but I just can’t face going poop. I know it’s going to be this massive undertaking…I just don’t see it happening this year. But next year–in the spring most likely–my plate should be cleared enough for me to make pooping a priority.”

If you followed that path, you’d likely wind up with some serious psychosis, not to mention a health crisis that would necessitate your paying a medical professional to perform an emergency extraction for you, followed by ongoing, outpatient coaching centered around the importance of listening to your body when it told you it “had to go.”

HA-HA. Right?

Isn’t that the most eff-in’ ridiculous comparison I’ve ever made?! This blogger gone insane!

Um, no. Poop might be funny, but the comparison I’m drawing is far from joking.

You have been listening to the signals your body has been giving you since you were born, since before you could interpret and remedy them by yourself: hunger, thirst, full, too full, painfully too full, can’t breathe, hate myself, why’d I’d do that to myself? Digestion, elimination, hunger— And you are a master at heeding these messages. You understand them to be components of the essential, underlying process that keeps you alive and healthy. That the process continues is proof of the fact that you are still ticking! You don’t expect any part of it to cease until you do.

It is the same with stuff.

To maintain a healthy home and relationship to material belongings, there must be a continual process of discovery and letting go, of adding and editing. If you loose sight of that, if you allow your space and life to become oversaturated with things you don’t want, can’t use, have forgotten you own, you risk the health of your home. And the longer you let this pervade, the more serious the issue becomes, until one day, you’ll need to hire a professional organizer (hi, that’s me! No colonoscopy.) to help you perform an emergency edit.

Image credit: Elle Macpherson (apparently shot by Ellen Von Unwerth though I can’t locate original source)