– ‘Throw some more clothes to make room in the closet.
– I’m not in the mood / Another time. / Why? They look good and I care about them.
“To make room for new ones.”
That’s how my mother convinces me to do a sorting exercise, to put things aside that I haven’t worn in a while. Many of the clothes have their stories: this dress is from London, I took it as a gift when I did something special; these shoes are from Paris, from a certain place; these boots are from Rome, for my birthday, when… and so on. Somehow, this emotional charge creates an attachment to some things. My mother, on the other hand, says: ‘what if it’s from Prada and it’s from Paris, I don’t like it anymore, that’s it, throw it away.’ It’s a much healthier attitude, which we have when we don’t care, when we have a cold mind.
So it is with other aspects of our lives. We remain stuck in some personal relationships, we think about one person for a long time, we see in other aspects that we liked or annoyed us at others in the past. If we had an abusive boss, we are left, in some cases, with the fear that everyone is the same.
We gather experiences and put them on top of each other, just as we put our clothes in the closet, instead of throwing them away and making room for new experiences.
I know, it’s hard to break away from everything emotionally charged. At the same time, if we don’t, our ‘closet’ will explode, just as mine did: its door fell.
A possible exercise is to take every thing, experience, relationship, to examine him / her carefully, to imagine if we would like him / her in the current context, to appreciate once again that thing, that relationship, and to break up. Of course, they remain an important part of our history, of who we are, of what we enjoyed, upset, formed us. But let us not allow them to be an equally important part of our future, let us leave room for something new, in accordance with who we are now.