2026 July 21 House cleaning and mind cleaning

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about re-imagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about, well, cleaning house. So let's get started.

If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell a friend, send me a message. This week we're going to be talking about tidying up our lives — why we do it, and what the costs and benefits are. There are many reasons why we might want to clean out old, and sometimes new, things in our lives.

Some are based on the reason for the cleanup. If you're moving, for example, it's kind of self-evident — anything you can clear out, you don't have to move, and it may no longer make sense from where you're going to.

But if you aren't moving and there are no major life changes planned, there are still benefits to cleaning up a bit, especially if you tend to accumulate things like I do. I can still remember my father's home office quite clearly. Every bookcase was stuffed to the gills, much like behind me.

There were newspapers all over the floor, and he'd say there were some good stories in them, that he was going to go back and read them again. He also had a bunch of different magazines across a wide variety of genres — a medical magazine, the JAMA Journal, and then things like how to run your standing gravel operation, mining magazines, outdoor magazines, all sorts of things he had interest in. Art magazines too, which, unfortunately, I didn't really understand until it was kind of too late.

But I've tried to follow in his footsteps. My core filing system is what might be called the archaeological file approach — which is not archival, don't get it confused. It's archaeological. You dig down to something you kind of remember occurred in the same time frame as what you're looking for. Then you know you're getting close to the letter or the document you're searching for.

There are plenty of people talking about what a drag this is on your life, and it's true — at times it does slow things down. But there are advantages too, especially if you're good at remembering the context of things. One of my sons is always amazed that I can remember exactly where a particular screwdriver is located among the assortment of toolboxes and places I leave tools. Everything's kind of a jumble to him. But to me, it all makes a lot of sense — I can picture the last time I handled it and remember the context, so I have a pretty good idea right where it is.

That is, until you reach a certain threshold, and then you remember you used it, and you think it was recently, but the context memory is kind of overloaded. When you reach that tipping point, all your wonderful surprise memories — the ones you come across while searching for the thing you actually wanted — suddenly turn into obstacles instead of motivators. That's usually when you start to look around and realize, I haven't actually emptied that corner and cleaned it out in years, not just months.

That's usually a good time to reevaluate whether your delightful, large, rich, and fundamentally useful collection of whatever it is you collect — books, art, tools, magazines, recipes, pictures, whatever — has suddenly morphed from serving you into controlling you and holding you back. This is a difficult realization, because it's like a faithful friend, a kind of superpower, suddenly turned into a time thief and an energy drain. The obvious remedy, decluttering, is made all the more difficult because you still see all those things that brought you happy memories and helped you in other ways. Now you're looking at their dark side — how they were hiding that dog comb you were looking for, just plain filling up so much of your life that it became overwhelming to even try to move forward on any front.

But there's good news after the storm. If you start small, you can make quick and easy progress and feel a little self-satisfied — maybe you can finally sit down at the kitchen table to eat again. So let me give you two tricks that help a lot.

The first is that the quickest way to attain cleanliness — kind of a cleanliness nirvana — is to take any clutter, put it in a box, and get it out of sight. Keep track of what's in there, obviously, in case you really need it again. But pick it up and put it somewhere it can't haunt you, just out of the way.

The big second part of the trick is to put a very visible label on it, and it contains only two pieces of information. The first is where it came from — such as "kitchen table." The second is really key: the date you did it. Put everything in the box and put it away. So at some point in the future, you may come across it, and the first thing you'll notice is that you've been living quite well without it for a few months, maybe a year, maybe even a couple of years. That's an excellent indicator of just how useful the contents were, or weren't, in your daily life.

Because, as always, our brains are trying to keep us safe. And what is safe? Familiar is safe. So when we surround ourselves with the familiar, we naturally feel safe and calm. That's the same old drawing that made a child stop crying a couple of years ago. Or, here's a broken part for my car, and boy, I remember that first date when the car broke down — what a great story to tell at a party. You come across these little things and they're kind of fun in one way.

But when we look closely at what we're keeping, it's often from previous times in our lives, in personally memorable ways. And that's fine, but only up to a point, because that same familiarity also encourages us to define ourselves by what we were at some previous point in time. The problem with that is we're always growing, we're always changing. But if part of us is living in the past, then we slowly generate a kind of dissonance in how we view ourselves in the present.

Remembering the past is good, but part of that has to be remembering that the past is well in the past. It's a good foundation for tomorrow, and we probably learned a lot, but our past does not define our future. This is especially true if we tend to dwell in the past in a romanticized way, where everything was great times, we never had any bad times. That's selective memory. And while personally amusing, and it makes for some great stories, it doesn't help us with the present or with moving into our future.

So how does a little clutter end up as a self-identity crisis, especially since identity is one of our most active five pillars of living? Because the clutter isn't the cause, it's the symptom. Finding half of a theater ticket from six years ago, from that great first date that didn't work out — like all the other relationships you've been in, because you're just not the kind of person that people like to stay with — and you're heading down that rabbit hole. That's nothing more than our mind spinning up a story to keep us "safe." But inadvertently, it's also keeping us stuck in our own past.

The short version of the saying is: stop tripping over things that are behind you. In other words, stop reliving the past and thinking that the past is defining your future. That's a whole large and exciting topic on its own, but you don't really have a past or a future. All you have is now. Your past is obviously behind you — it's good for learning from, but it does not define you. Your future is nothingness. It's something you can try to imagine, or dream about, or work toward, but in reality it doesn't exist. The only thing you can control is now, right now, your actions right this second.

So that little memento — that movie ticket — is kind of an encoded message to your brain to start playing the "I'm a loser" soundtrack. You might think it's a reminder of a good time, but it's really a reminder of why you're a failure. Which isn't true, of course, but it's the kind of negative self-talk that seemingly harmless clutter can bring to the surface.

So now, with these new supervisory powers you've just gained, take a look around you. Look at what you see and ask yourself a very simple question: Are these items empowering me, or are they holding me back? Are they helping me set up the future I deserve, or are they undermining me by tying me to previous perceived failures? And note that I said perceived — nothing said that first date that crash-landed was your fault entirely, and even if it was, hopefully you took away some great life lessons from it.

Suddenly you might discover that much of your previous clutter was really just a barrier to help preserve the old you — that it provided familiarity, being familiar with a version of you that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all, except in negative self-talk. The other thing that may happen is you may start to notice that you actually have a lot more things around you that bring you current joy than you realized. That's a real breakthrough, because here you were looking at things and thinking, "that didn't go well," while sitting right next to something that happened recently and made you smile and made you genuinely happy. It's worth noticing and celebrating the good things. It's a big change in your life, and it's a real step forward. And it all started because you became mindful of your environment and its effect on you.

So whether you're cleaning up your house or moving to a new place — if we simply empty each room and carefully refill it with only things that are currently bringing value into our lives, that can actually create a very significant life change. It's most effective when coupled with being mindful of the feelings your surroundings bring into your life. If they bring energy and comfort, that's good. But if they just bring up negative self-talk and limiting beliefs, then you really have to step back and evaluate the best way to move yourself forward.

Remember, there is no past, there is no future. Those are just useful abstractions we make for ourselves. At any instant in time, we only live in the present. And from that vantage point in the present, we can learn from our past and use that knowledge to guide our actions to live the future we desire.

So don't be afraid of tidying up — in every aspect of our lives, a little closer inspection can sometimes yield some unexpectedly positive results.

So that's it for the evening. Thanks so much for joining me. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. We have two sites: UKR7.com, which links to people helping the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org, World Central Kitchen. Both are international sites and work on an international level, but there are also a lot of local charities that would love your help. And even if you're not in a position or mindset to do that right now, even something as simple as a smile can change someone else's day for the better, in ways you can't even imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something useful or interesting, please pass it along, please subscribe, hit that like button, and please drop me a comment about anything you'd like to discuss. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7Every Minute and 7EveryMinute.com.