“The first step to getting what you want is having the courage to get rid of what you don’t.”

These are the words you sent to me today.

You said it reminded you of some advice I’d given and I want to say I’m sorry.
About the advice I mean. It was a glib show,
dressed up in the satin-slippery glamour of poetic quotes.

It got in the way of the truth,
of nakedly saying I don’t know.

For the state I’m in lends itself to purging:

In between bouts of nausea I’m prowling madly through the house, making a mess
as I dig like a dangerous animal searching for prey—
killing anything that doesn’t bring beauty, joy or usefulness.

All these corpses.

And it’s not just dead objects I’m hunting down.
I’ve unhooked myself from the online magazines and
self-help programs and blogs and their cousins who I’ve collected over the years—
sick of their reproachful unread status cluttering up my inbox.

I want surfaces. Space. Emptiness.

I want to sell up and sweep out all the stuff I think I know
cluttering the inside of my head
and start all over again—
Beginner’s Mind.

It’s all marked down, like those huge sales where everything must go.

Once empty I’ll have no more advice to give,
nor will I regurgitate from the mouth of social media
words said a thousand-fold.

Trading aphorisms seems a poor exchange for
saying something risky, unspoken or intoxicating instead.

So it’s quite uncanny that you sent me what you did.

For it’s only from this newly spacious mind that I can say
how much I like it that someone on the other side of night
thinks of me in the emerging light of day—

Making me wonder
what I want to make all this space for.

 

Relephant read:

Inner Housekeeping: 10 Steps to Clearing Mental Clutter.

~

Author: Nina Geraghty

Editor: Khara-Jade Warren

Image: martinak15/ Flickr