Wise Musings from the Person Sitting Next to Me at the Cafe
Written by DaisyJane Darling
A few months ago I was sitting in my favorite cafe in Seattle when I overheard an insightful conversation. It was a cozy, gray December Sunday. I was wearing a fuzzy sweater, sipping a hot matcha latte, and working on a different article for the Collective Creations Newsletter from the corner of Olympia Coffee. As I was tapping away on my computer, I started to pick up on a few words being exchanged a few seats away from me. The conversation belonged to a pair of friends, a man and a woman probably in their 60s, who hadn’t seen each other in a while and were catching up on life. The woman was relating how she had just gone through a big move, in which she sold her house and had to go through all of her things. This led into her spiritual take-away from the experience, which had to do with the significance of cultivating our physical and metaphysical space.
As I tuned in with more attention, I desperately wanted to hold onto her words. They were simple yet deeply profound, and so I jotted down as much as I could. Here is a paraphrased version of her sage coffee shop musings:
The physical exists because we speak it into existence. We think about a table, we talk about how convenient a table could be, and then we use those thoughts and words to create a table. Conversations manifest into the physical world we create around us.
The conversations we have about ourselves, we put those into the physical world with our responding actions. Our physical spaces reflect our conversations about our lives, as do the metaphysical spaces we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with. The way we arrange our physical spaces keeps certain conversations in our life.
What are you keeping around you? Does your space cultivate the things you love? Does your space represent who you are or who you want to be, how you want to live? Are you holding onto things from your past that no longer represent the life you want to live?
I have found myself constantly thinking about her words. I tend to think about the things I own quite a bit already; I desperately want to live a minimal lifestyle, so I am constantly trying to dejunk my space and be conscious about what I hold onto, yet somehow always seem to end up with more stuff than I’d like to have. Putting that conversation with myself through the new lens offered by my coffee shop neighbor has been an interesting exercise, and helped me become more conscious about my belongings in a different way.
I encourage you to join me in examining the way you curate your space:
What conversations and ideas about yourself are you maintaining through the presence of physical things you choose to have around you?
Do you like or agree with these conversations?
Do you have any conversations about yourself that have kept you back from curating a space that feels freeing and relaxed?
How do the people you spend your time with factor in? Do they support conversations you want to speak into being?
When was the last time you really took inventory, truthfully asked yourself which things around you are actively supporting you or adding to your life? Could you make do without them?
What conversations about yourself and your life would you like to speak into reality?
What visions do you have that inspire you, make you smile? How can you carry those into the physical?
I hope some of these questions land for you as they did for me. In our consumerism-based world, it can take a lot of work to be mindfully in harmony with your space, rather than controlled by your space. My favorite thing to do when re-determining what I want to keep and what I want to send to a new home is to make 3 categories: Yes’s, No’s, and Maybe’s. I keep the Yes’s, donate the No’s (or have a little dejunking party to let my friends go through everything first, especially clothes). Then I take the Maybe’s and put them in a box, in the back of a closet. If I don’t need or remember what’s in there by the end of 3 months, then out it goes!
If you feel called to, start asking these questions. Be curious. Go at your own pace. If you’re like me and feel like sometimes you’re fighting an uphill battle, constantly trying to minimalize and often feeling overwhelmed - don’t be hard on yourself. There’s a lot of heavy energetic weight that lives in our things, and it’s okay to be exactly where you are, with all of your things and all of the other things they come with! You’re just fine exactly as you are. Treat yourself with grace as you unload that heavy weight, and step by step it will feel lighter.