Put Order To Your External Chaos To Be Happier
Have you ever wondered why one day, for no apparent or conscious reason, you wake up and have the vital need to put your closet in order? Or why do you have an irrepressible desire to move the furniture around, to clear the work table of papers that did not bother you before, or to throw objects at which you suddenly no longer find meaning?
When that happens, your mind is crying out for renewal and to regain lost motivation and energy. It is important that you pay attention to these signs to get down to work and resolve the situation as soon as possible.
Often an external change is the first step to achieving a profound internal change. Surely, if you stop to think for a few seconds, you will remember once that you have tidied up your room or your house and this has been transformed into an inner tranquility that you did not have before.
What does it help you to organize the physical space?
The outer order can promote greater inner peace in you. In fact, Marie Kondo, author of the world best-seller The Magic of Order , claims that an orderly home is the first step to happiness.
An orderly and bright environment can provide you with a greater sense of well-being and comfort than a neglected environment. The physical environment in which we spend most of our time often affects the way we think and feel.
Organizing is the first task that will allow us to address other changes in our life later. In the first place, because our energy needs ordered and renewed spaces to flow freely. Second, external chaos is usually the result of internal disorder, and this is caused by accumulating unpleasant feelings such as fear or discouragement.
Our mind locates them with a certain learned logic and there they stay until the alarms go off. The first alarm is the need to put everything around us in order with the intention that our mind does too. It is easier to make an external change first and then do it internally.
The link between order and the new cycles
Many times those who are ready to start ordering our physical space appear when a new cycle begins:
- When we start the year
- When we start a new course in September
- When we come back from vacation
- After our birthday
- When we start a new job
- When we change house or city
These are common times when we decide to change. So we can turn the page and start a new stage with the stopwatch at zero. When we manage to put things in their place, getting rid of what we can consider useless and repositioning what we want to keep. We have not only tidied up our physical space, we have also tidied up our ‘mental closet’.
How can you get rid of the unnecessary?
When you are able to differentiate what is necessary from everything accessory, from what you keep but are convinced that you will never use it again, you will see the reality more clearly. If you find it difficult to discern between what is useful and what is not, a tip would be to throw away all the things that you have not used in the last year (clothes, books, documents …).
And if you have a ‘throwing phobia’ because you feel like you are abandoning a part of yourself, think that these thoughts are parasitic and completely false. What you have to do precisely is act and this will help you create more space for the new (both physical and mental and emotional).
In many cultures, there are ceremonies in which old objects and symbolic representations of people who are considered negative are burned to restore inner peace. For example, in San Juan objects that bring back bad memories or letters that have the fears and names of people who do not want to continue being part of their life are thrown at the stake.
Order and positive thinking
It is absolutely true that there is a correlation between order and the generation of pleasant thoughts. As you order, whether on impulse or premeditated, you reflect on what makes you happy, what worries you, and what bothers you.
When you fill the bags with useless things, you become aware of everything that is not important and what is, so that each object that you throw away corresponds to some experience that you do not want to keep in your life. Little by little, you are lightening your luggage.
Prioritize and think ahead
Sorting helps you prioritize and think about immediate and future needs, so we recommend making a list and, with it, setting realistic goals. Saturating yourself with goals is not good, since it only leads to not being able to meet them and, therefore, this situation will trigger a state of frustration and discouragement. Then, everything listed will end up being in the drawer of oblivion.
Ordering your mind and your conscience will help you to give more meaning to your life, helping you to live in the present moment, to let go of the unnecessary and to stay with the essential, looking at the future with new eyes.
Thus, a greater physical order will help you to have a greater mental and emotional order to take on new challenges with more energy. If you are at the beginning of the road and you are prepared, think that you only have one mission left. Do it!
