What’s in Your Closet?

Something happened yesterday. It was a small thing and though I outwardly reacted in an appropriately small way, I was inwardly riled by it. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, calmed my breathing, and told myself to let it go. But then I thought, let it go where?

Seriously, where is this place where all the stuff we let go of goes? Does it heap up in some mind closet, because that’s my best guess. And if that’s the case, it follows that you can only toss so many things onto your let it go pile before the closet can no longer contain it all. Then one day you crack open the door to toss something small on the pile and the door bursts wide open and stuff pours out everywhere. All over your nice tidy calm-breathing, positive-thinking mind, mucking up the works.

This is how everything else works, so it makes sense that the same applies here, right? I mean, you can only put so much crap in your junk drawer before it reaches capacity. And we can bury barrels of toxic waste deep in the earth, but sooner or later the walls of the barrels weaken and the poison leaches into our soil and water. That’s some pretty basic stuff. If this, then that.

I think we all have a few of those mind closets, each assigned its own person or situation. Yesterday, in that small moment, my this led to my that for one of my closets and I’ll tell ‘ya, the shit was all over the place. What a mess. My first instinct was to try to shove it all back in there and then quickly close the door with all my might. Maybe nail some boards across it so it’d stay closed. But then I scanned the contents. There were a bunch of small things that individually would take up only the tiniest bit of space. When you gather enough tiny things though, they become much more formidable. There were also some big, heavy, rather clunky things. Those are hard to ignore and even harder to move. When I think about it, it must have been a helluva task for me to have maneuvered them into the closet in the first place. So, yay me?

Hmmm. Not so much.

Who teaches us to tuck all that stuff away? Are we self-taught or do we learn at the hands of those we grow up with and around? Does some let-it-go-mantra-offering guru suggest it and, pained and searching, as humans tend to be, we think, ahh yes, that’s the answer. Do those of us who are really nice gather more in our let it go closets than those who instead simply hand whatever it is back to its rightful owner. “Here, I believe you dropped this.” Sure, those not quite as nice folks might make people uncomfortable sometimes but look at their lovely airy closets! Barely a dust mite in them! My guess is they feel the need to stop, close their eyes, and calm their breathing far less frequently than those of us—we mind pack rats, non-boat-rockers, let it go hoarders—do. Maybe nice isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But then again, like the toxic waste in those barrels, once something exists, it exists. Right? Whether we toss it in the closet or refuse to take even temporary ownership of it, it’s still been created and therefore is still somewhere. Doing something.

I suppose the best we can do is to be mindful of the impact our choices have, in order to minimize the stuff other people—other nice people—then store in their closets. And maybe, as nice as we may pride ourselves on being, we should also develop the skill of returning other people’s property to them. Immediately and without fanfare. With open hands and a shrug. That’s yours, not mine.

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