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When we first move in somewhere, the place seems spacious and uncluttered, because there are few objects in it. As time goes by, little by little, we accumulate things, and even though we may try to dispose of what we don't need, the battle always seems uphill.
The mind of an older person is a bit like that, like a house full of junk. There are all sorts of traces of our past taking up space in our minds. We don't need them, but we bump into them, and they have a way of making themselves felt. Say something wonderful happens. The joy tries but often fails to fill in every nook and cranny of our minds, because all the remnants of the past are there, getting in the way, like objects on a shelf that make it difficult to dust. As a result, the joy we experience is often adulterated. Impure.
There is that lightness of being that we remember from childhood and adolescence, but that rarely, if ever, comes to us later in life. It may seem that the reason we feel "heavier" with time is the relative triviality of a young person's troubles compared to those of an adult. There is something to that, certainly, but it is not the only factor and possibly not the main one. For a child does not perceive his or her own worries as unserious. Rather, there are just fewer of them.
When we are very young, we are like tenants who have recently moved into the clean space of a new mind. If we are worried, there is the current worry, mostly. That may feel heavy, but we can bear it because we haven't been dragging a big backpack full of remains of the past everywhere we go for years. And when a better wave comes and replaces the dark waters, we can take it all in. There is space. Space in our backpacks. Space inside our minds. We can feel pure, unadulterated joy.
Aristotle suggested once that tragedy, by arousing in us negative emotions such as pity and fear, helps us purge our minds of those same feelings. We get rid of those, interestingly, by letting ourselves feel them. He called this process "catharsis." But maybe what we often need is a method of removing not pity and fear, but clutter. Eclectic, stifling clutter.
This does not seem easy to do, but I suspect the difficulty stems chiefly from our own ambivalence. Much as we keep all sorts of objects we don't need, despite the fact they create clutter, just because we somehow find ourselves unable to dispose of them, so also we want but at the same time don't want to get rid of the hodgepodge of rags of the past we store in our minds. It's clutter, welter, jumble, but it's ours, and we get attached to what we perceive as ours, much as we do in the case of useless material belongings.
Of course, when it comes to material objects, just about everyone who decides to minimize his or her possessions and keep only what is needed reports relief. The person who gets rid of material junk is happy to have done so. The situation with mental clutter may be similar. While at times we discover the value of things only when we lose them, at other times, by giving things up, we discover that many of them really had no value for us at all and were just taking up space.
There is the question of how exactly we might go about de-cluttering our minds. That's a topic for a longer discussion, but I will note that the first step is to want to do it. To dispose of the key obstacle: ambivalence.
As for the actual method, once we've adopted the goal, different people might find that different strategies work for them—certain kinds of mindfulness practices, surfing, and a host of other things. What I myself do is try to approach things—perhaps starting with something as simple as looking at a flower—with a clean mind. I remember looking at a pansy once when I was a child and feeling as though, small as it was, it could engulf me with the depth of its dark violet color and that rich yet delicate texture. The little pansy had me spellbound.
More generally, I did not need a particularly strong stimulus to get fully absorbed. I could stare for a long time at the flames of a fire, at a body of water, an icicle in the sunlight, and any number of other things. It is much more difficult now because memories of the past and thoughts about the future come unbidden. I don't remember having many thoughts about the future as a child, except for some kind of vague excitement about growing up. My mind was there to be engulfed by anything.
And yet, if I fully focus on a pansy or a sunbeam playing inside an icicle now, I find that I can bring myself to the state of mental absorption I could effortlessly slide into as a child. I can look at the world without letting my mental clutter obscure the view. This state is very pleasurable and a good starting point for the kind of mind cleansing I have been advocating here.
Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo became famous in the West in recent years with the KonMari house de-cluttering method, but it should be noted that a minimalist indoor aesthetic has a very long history in Kondo's native Japan. Not surprisingly, haiku—which, with its perfect focus and brevity, seems like a cleaned-up version of a poem—originated in Japan as well. I think a haiku might be a good way to end this post, which, incidentally, I first thought of titling "Haiku Your Mind." Note that I even reduced the number of syllables on every line—my poem's syllables' pattern is 4-6-4 instead of the traditional 5-7-5 (I haiku-ed the haiku):
Like an abyss
In silence draws me in
A violet
Follow me here.
