Can Getting Organized, Bring You A Vacation Every Day?

ball and chainAre you attached to your stuff? I hear this from clients all the time. It’s provided as an explanation for why there is too much stuff in their homes. There’s nothing wrong with being attached to something. Attachments bring us comfort. However, it is important to be aware of what we are attached to. If we are attached to too much, we get weighed down, and we can’t go anywhere.

Speaking of going somewhere, remember the last time you went on vacation? Were the days preceding it incredibly stressful? If you’re like anyone else, they probably were. Why? It comes from all the attachments in life and the preparations you needed to make, to detach from them.

Think about it. There are all those attachments at work, you need to make arrangements for, before you can disappear. Maybe you have been attached to a project for weeks and now you have to bring it to a finishing point or detach yourself from it and attach someone else to it through delegation. Stressful!

Think of all the routines you are attached to every week. Each requires a different arrangement to detach yourself from it. But finally, you have found a way to detach yourself from your closet and dresser and everything is in a suitcase and you’re off!

It’s still stressful, because you have so many attachments, that you know you must be forgetting something, but when you finally arrive at your clean, clear hotel room, that all changes. Why? It’s a blank canvas for you to paint a new picture. It doesn’t take long to put your few clothes and toiletries away. Now all that’s left are new experiences. New places to eat, new places to see, new people to meet. What a great feeling!

Hold that feeling. You can keep that feeling by letting go of some of the unnecessary attachments back home. The less you hold on to material attachments, the more you open yourself up to experiential attachments. Material attachments tend to act as barriers to great experiences.

Take the long view. When you look back on great memories, they are almost always great experiences. Rarely are they about the great stuff you owned. There is a limit in our lives to how many items and experiences we can enjoy. The more stuff we keep, the more stuff we have to worry about and the more stuff we have to do.

So ask yourself, the next time you find yourself saying you are attached to your stuff, what great experiences could you open yourself up for by liberating yourself from some of these material attachments? When you get clear on the great experiences you could be gaining, it is easier to let go the stuff that is getting in the way. That’s a vacation you can take every day.

What are your favorite attachments?