You know, I’ve been so taken with Fly Lady’s belief that it’s better to spend fifteen minutes every day de-cluttering than it is to spend half your Saturday doing the same. I’ve managed to lighten up our house by maybe two hundred pounds in recent weeks, sorting through books, newspaper clips and magazines for a quarter hour every day. Fly Lady says it’s best to clock your decluttering sessions with a kitchen timer so you don’t run over. But I get so lonely cleaning up, and filing bills and papers–gosh, what is it with me?–I just can’t manage it sometimes. I blame my eyes for this mostly. Every time it’s time to put something away in its proper place, I can’t seem to find my reading glasses. It’s the strangest thing. And then when I find my glasses, I notice a good magazine I haven’t yet read, and then, well, I have to read it before recycling it, right?

So this morning, I got an idea: why not, in addition to what I’m already doing, insist upon a rocking family sorting/cleaning/purging festival for thirty minutes every weekend, say, after Saturday’s breakfast? The four of us could play loud music, sing as we work, and really put some muscle into several of our troubling, cluttered hot spots. There’s been a sad stack of abandonned salad bowls, board games, and candle decorating supplies in the corner of our dining room since Christmas. What’s the deal there? It needs to go. We have another family hang-up: it’s called putting CDs back in their plastic cases. Why is that so hard?

Mindfulness. When you really confront our general lack of it, the whole morass of our living circumstance becomes painful to contemplate. Our minds are chattering so fast that it is hard to do the right thing, make the calm choice, find clarity. We will end up chasing our tails if we don’t meditate, take a breath, and find the sanity that’s always there and available to us. And our kids! How will they learn from us if we’re still struggling to keep our heads above the bills and magazines?

I am interested in hearing any other ideas from you about how you successfully manage these kinds of difficulties, or fail to. True confessions time!