monster in my closet

I've been trying to commit myself to at least 15 minutes a day organizing/reorganizing/cleaning up some section of our home. The organizational tip websites say to consolidate, reduce, then compress. Bring everything into one place, take out the stuff we don't use or have too many of, then arrange it in a way that utilizes the space efficiently. Another site says that to reorganize a closet, you have to take everything out, then put it back in, thus you have to choose what gets put back into the closet.

This week so far:
-maximized the t-shirt capacity of hubby's dresser
-catalogued most of the dvds, books, music here
-reorganized a closet to hold all our jackets
-started a garagesale box
-worked on a patch in the 2nd bedroom, getting rid of the wedding planning stuff

in the week left, hope to:
-get started on the thank you notes
-finish cataloguing dvds, books, and music here
-reorg the bathroom drawers

The place is far from picture perfect (way far), but feels good to be making progress.

All of this, on a practical side to facilitate our household consolidation, but on another hand, yet another way to explore a side of myself that I previously never imagined myself to be: to keep up place decent enough that I wouldn't be so fearful of having people see it. And somewhere in all this clutter are experiences growing up, some old rebellious nature, some need to see where things are, and also deep down tied to my current inability to maintain form and order. On a two dimensional level my mind is fairly organized, numbers, spreadsheets, things like that. It's the 3 dimensional stuff I have trouble with. Part of my lack of being able to put things away is that I have never decided where to put things in the first place, so it ends up that things find their own place to be which is just about everywhere else.

I was reminded this weekend that I should look to make a paradigm shift, but a shift that allows me to retain the things that I am good at, yet to have the ability to choose to be just as good at something else. But to make any shift, some movement has to take place, a breaking of old habits. So this is what I'm doing, trying to break old habits to create new ones. And like most things I take on in life, I'm doing all this not to hold up to some grandiose image, but just to see, see if I could do it, having obviously already seen what happens when I don't do it, I need a change of pace. I figure, it can't hurt if I try it out.

In reorging a couple of closets, I find one question about my psyche, why do I keep empty boxes? And subsequently, empty boxes in relatively empty closets? I have a feeling its tied to some sort of sadness, I don't know what exactly and maybe the reason for it is long gone. So it's not so much that I am rearranging stuff as it is more that I need to rearrange my emptiness.