Until my family moved to Cotulla when I was in the 7th grade, we moved about every three years. I was six weeks old when my dad finished his Navy service in California, and he moved his family back to Texas in 1954 to a cotton farm near Colorado City. Dad says he picked the worst three years of the century to farm, which was right in the middle of the severe fifties drought. Dad shifted gears to start a career in electronics and moved the family to Lubbock, followed by Corpus Christi, Fort Stockton, Salt Flat, and then Cotulla in 1967.
The memories of most of those years are neatly compartmentalized in my brain, divided into three year segments by communities, the houses, and the people in our lives at those times. I felt like I'd lived a whole lifetime before we moved to Cotulla. That was a watershed line for me. I seemed to compare and relate everything in the present and future with what I had experienced in the past in these other towns. It wasn't until I was in my late thirties that I realized I had lived longer in Cotulla than all the other communities combined. Up until that point, moving to Cotulla at age thirteen seemed to be the halfway mark in my life.
My memories of these past thirty-five years are much more difficult to sort and recall. Many of them are jumbled up together with few dividers marking time. Anniversaries and birth dates are usually memorable dividers, but they've all blurred with the passage of time. My children's adolescent years help somewhat, along with a few jobs here and there, but most of my memories are scattered about like the unorganized piles of clutter in my house
Another advantage of moving every few years is that it forces us to recognize what's important enough to keep and take with us, and to discard everything else. I'm not going to name names, but the Casey kids have inherited a patriarchal genetic clutter trait. I watch Hoarding: Buried Alive reality show every so often to scare me into to attempting to keep it under control. I'm going through a great, but convicting, study course-- Mercy Triumphs by Beth Moore-- that I keep reading and re-reading to try to get it to sink in. On my closet door I taped the following quote:
"The sin of hoarding is more than just having. It's having without using."
To me, clutter feels like packing on the pounds a little at a time. For a while we don't notice it, then things start to feel uncomfortably tight, and eventually we fill up every conceivable space in our clothes and we're out of room. But instead of losing weight, we just buy larger size clothes.
Now go back and replace clothes with "houses" and losing weight with "de-cluttering." The clutter pushes our cars out of the garage, then it spills out into newly purchased storage sheds or fills up rented storage rooms. And on it goes, draining our resources, energy, and motivation to prioritize, simplify and let go. I'm not sure which is the greater restraint: us hanging onto our stuff, or our stuff having a chokehold on us.
One source of clutter in our homes is the gifts we buy each other, continually filling already full homes because we feel the need to express our love in tangible ways. Then we feel obligated to keep those gifts for sentimental reasons, even when they don't fit, match, or have any useful purpose. Or we battle clutter by giving them practical gifts like underwear or socks for a birthday or holiday. We've been given orders to not buy any more toys for my grandchildren for Christmas, so I can't wait to see their faces when they open up several presents of "practical" items. I'm thinking about turning it into a scavenger hunt to fun it up a little.
What about considering gifts that don't take up space and add more clutter to one's home? A friend told me she paid another friend's library fine for her birthday when the friend was going through a tough financial time. I thought that was a great idea, and it benefited the friend's entire family to unblock borrowing privileges at the library. Here are some other suggestions:
- Magazine subscriptions are wonderful gifts that can be donated to a library, nursing home, woman's shelter, etc. after reading them.
- Gifts could be made in someone's name to a church, a charitable organization, scholarship fund, library, etc.
- Monetary gifts could be given to a child's college fund or savings account.
- Gift certificates for meals, movies, or concerts are great ideas.
- One could give a gift of time and energy to those full-time working folks by mowing their lawn, baby-sitting, helping clean out their garage or paint a room, etc.
Now de-cluttering my mind is another story, and I'm not sure I will ever get my memories of my years in Cotulla organized, but I am working on prioritizing what I allow my mind to dwell on. One of my favorite verses says:
Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy, think on these things. Philippians 4:8
And that's a good place to start. I notice it does not mention bitterness, unforgiveness, anger, lust, revenge, self-pity, envy, covetousness, and regret. If any of these chokeholds are cluttering up our minds, they should be the first things we get rid of. Otherwise, like clutter, they'll eventually bury us.
Now, I'm off to work on my clutter piles-- inside and outside of my head.
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