Clutter's Underbelly: Clutter as Attachment

Oh, to be free and bend with the wind...



My "Spring Cleaning" experiment is about clearing my clutter - in a real and thorough way. As I've been working through this for many months, I can speak to the slippery slope of cleaning up in the physical realm but not really looking under the rocks at the true story of my clutter. It is a circular journey, often frustratingly with small gains at a time. So I'm ready to approach this differently.

Clutter blocks positive energy's ability to flow through our space as well as through our lives. It reflects an aspect within your life that you are "attached to" (in the Buddhist sense) - something holding us back or dragging us down. Though clutter is physical, it has an energy to it and it connects to emotions or thoughts within us. This whole experiment of mine is looking into what hides within the clutter in my own home.

Clutter as Attachment

We can describe clutter as a collection of physical things that are not actively in use, perhaps uncared for, their purpose unclear, yet still with us all the same. The Buddhist concept of attachment is something we cling to (i.e., "I don't want this to change!"), something that causes us pain, worry, fear, something that causes us "suffering" in Buddhist terms. Seeing clutter as attachment extends beyond the physical to explain the emotional and spiritual, so it helps us understand how clutter is more than "just stuff".  Both describe things that we strain and suffer to let go.

Attachment is explained in the Second Noble Truth in Buddhism: "The cause of our suffering is our own grasping and clinging, our attachments to our desires" (The Lotus Still Blooms: Sacred Buddhist Teachings for the Western Mind by Joan Gattuso, p. 12). "We experience suffering because we cling, grasp, have unmet expectations, have addictions" (p. 15). As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation, "Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don't, it isn't holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of our suffering" (p. 9). Perhaps this is why there's the saying about stuff "controlling" your life!

If our clutter is a device to see our attachments, then just sorting and sifting, disposing and donating, minimizing and managing, oscillating and organizing is not enough. We must "look deeply" into it to free ourselves from the thought patterns and habits which lie at the root of how our clutter comes to be cluttering our lives. The alternative to attachment is trust, faith, openness, and freedom (non-attachment).

May I transform my clutter to create that free movement, that openness, so that what I do have are things that purposeful, beloved, and support my life.