Field Notes: Cluttered Space, Cluttered Mind

It's time to clean house

There’s a part in Rocky Balboa where the title character is walking through the neighborhood he’s spent most of his life in and he says: “If you live one place long enough, you become that place.”

I’m a firm believer that the environment we create for ourselves is a reflection of our state of mind. Nowhere is that more true for me than in my home office. It’s the room in our home where I spend most of my time. It’s where I’m sitting as I type this.

I am this place. And you know what? I got pretty fucking tired of what I was seeing.

The clutter accumulated so gradually that I didn’t even notice. Once every drawer was stuffed to capacity (out of sight, out of mind!), all of my binders/books/journals started stacking up on my desk. And then the cabinet. And then every other free surface. When I ran out of those, things started piling up in the corners.

It’s crazy what you can learn to tolerate. Not being able to fully open the door because there’s too much shit jammed behind it? Totally normal! Sliding a squat rack and a few hundred lbs worth of weight plates out of the way every time I need to get into the closet (and then sliding all of it back again when I’m done)? No big deal! I guess I’ll just stop putting important stuff in there.

Beyond the impracticality, there’s also very little about the space that feels indicative of who I am or what I’m interested in. The walls and shelves are decorated with items that reflect points in time I’ve long since outgrown.

"It's hard to grow beyond something if you won't let go of it."
-James Clear

But I thought putting up with this situation was easier than dealing with it. Because even something as simple as getting a bookshelf to help organize the clutter became a total fiasco…

I’d tell myself that all I had to do was clear out a corner for it. But… the only corner where something like that might fit already had one of my acoustic guitars, a trash can, and some exercise equipment in it.

I could put the guitar in the closet with the others. But… only if I got rid of that box of old film props. And what if we needed one of those again for a future project?

The trash can would fit under my desk. But… then I’d have to get rid of the old PC tower I have under there.

I could recycle that. But… don’t they recommend you remove the hard drive first? How long is that going to take?

Every possible solution was followed by a “But…”

I’ve also been operating under the very persuasive delusion that it doesn’t even make sense to deal with any of this right now. Wouldn’t it be easier to just throw everything out once we move and then start fresh in the new place? There would be less to pack up and then I could pick out furniture and decor that’s more compatible with the next home office. So you see, I was actually doing myself a great big favor by making this a problem for Future Chris to deal with.

But I didn’t need my therapist to connect the dots on what was really going on here. This wasn’t just a room. This was me. I have a bad habit of letting stuff pile up and up and up until it has nowhere left to go and eventually topples over. In the end, trying to avoid it just leaves me with a bigger mess to clean up.

And when that tendency is externalized in this way, it’s almost always because there’s something happening internally — some problem, fear, or truth I’m trying to run away from. But when you can’t be honest with yourself about what you’re thinking or feeling, you become a timebomb. And the longer the countdown, the larger the blast radius when it finally goes off.

This is something I know I have to be mindful of, but like a lot of bad habits, it’s sneaky. It adapts. And so, that’s how I found myself with several piles worth of emotional baggage that was starting to sway. The collapse was imminent. And the state of this home office became a perfect metaphor for this moment in my life…

Tolerating uncomfortable situations because confronting them felt even harder. Making excuses. Waiting for a more ideal time or set of circumstances to try and make a change.

But that? Well, that’s pretty much the exact fucking opposite of the advice I’ve been giving you, isn’t it?

Because when we’re talking about the novel you want to write or the film you want to make or the album you want to record, I urge you not to get too overwhelmed by all of the steps required to reach your end destination. Instead, I tell you to focus only on that very first step. And then the second. And then the third. Because most creative projects and skills are all about incremental progress and small changes to your daily routine that compound over time.

But creativity isn’t just about writing or painting or music. Sometimes creativity is figuring out what to do when a messy room has become a monument to giving up. Sometimes it’s discovering how to keep moving forward when all of the roads seem blocked.

If I were to resign myself to something as simple as a cluttered office, I’d be resigning myself to everything. I’ve quoted Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life before and I’m going to do it again…

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

The state of that room… my state of mind… it had all become untenable. But resolving it still felt like a massive undertaking. So as I discussed this with my therapist, we identified the smallest action I could take to get started: getting rid of that dusty old computer under the desk.

That’s it. That was the only thing I needed to take care of before our next meeting. The goal was to not let myself get discouraged by thinking too far ahead and worrying about all of the subsequent steps.

So a few days later, I set aside an hour to disassemble the computer’s chassis and remove the hard drive. It took five minutes. My mind had transformed this into an insurmountable problem and in the end, it took longer to find the right screwdriver than it did to complete the task.

I was finally rid of the damn thing! It felt like cutting free from an anchor. I wanted more of that feeling. So naturally, I kept going. I moved on to the next step. And then the next. All the while making sure I was never concerning myself with anything more than the current objective.

When I saw my therapist again one week later, I hadn’t just cleared out a corner for a bookcase, I had cleaned out damn near everything — every single box, drawer, and shelf. I didn’t even realize how much this stuff was weighing me down until it was gone. And now, anything that couldn’t be donated or recycled is finally piled up where it belongs — in the garbage bins out back.

And I did this by following a lot of the same advice I’ve shared with you when it comes to your creative endeavors. I committed to spending a little bit of time on it each day (the average was only 20-30 min) and holding myself accountable with the Don’t Break The Chain method.

And look, I’m not even close to being finished. As I said, this is a gigantic project. Even still, it’s been just under two weeks and frankly, I’m stunned by the amount of progress that’s already been made. But it’s also important to note that some of those days felt very underwhelming. Sometimes it felt like all I’d accomplished was creating a bigger mess and a handful of new problems to solve. But that was (and continues to be) good practice for learning to play the long game.

There are still certain factors that are out of my hands, such as the fact that there are parts of this building that have seen better days. So even when I’m done, believe me… no one’s going to mistake this place for a penthouse suite at the Four Seasons.

But so what? Just because I can’t skip straight to the ending of the most ideal outcome doesn’t mean I get to pretend I have no agency whatsoever. This project represents what I can control in the time we have left here. It’s the very best I can do at this particular moment. Which, unsurprisingly, also happens to be the key to dealing with all of the shit I’ve got going on internally as well.

Here’s the great irony — we think we’re protecting ourselves by avoiding difficult situations, but that takes so much more effort and feels so much worse than just engaging with them. You can try to hide from the truth, but it always knows right where to find you.

So it might be worth taking a look around and doing some reflecting. What does your environment say about your state of mind? And if there’s something you’d like to change, what’s the first step you could take today? Right now?

Because it’s not just how we spend our days, it’s where. Where we spend our days is where we spend our lives.

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5 Cool Things

31 Secrets to Unlocking Your Creativity. GQ asked well-known artists to share tips and tricks for finding inspiration and staying productive. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I suspect you might be interested in this. =-)

Rick Rubin: How To Access Your Creativity. I mentioned Rubin in a recent post (and he’ll almost certainly come up again), so I wanted to share this interview he did with Andrew Huberman. It’s also available as a podcast if you’d rather just listen to it. Like most of Huberman’s interviews, this is a very deep dive. At 3+ hours, it might get more granular than what you’re looking for, but there are timestamps you can use to jump to a particular subject you’re curious about.

20 Decluttering Rules That The Experts Say Are Life-Changing. If you’re considering your own round of spring cleaning, this post from the A To Zen Life blog does a good job of digging into the nitty-gritty of it.

Blue Jay. This was one of those movies that had been sitting in my Netflix queue for years. I had some time the other night, it’s under ninety minutes, and I decided to give it a go. This is a very low-budget movie starring Jay Duplass and Sarah Paulson that was shot in just seven days and largely improvised based on an outline from Duplass. Now, I realize a sentence like that is going to be kryptonite for some of you. Fair enough! But for me, it’s catnip. I really liked it and there are a couple of moments I can’t stop thinking about.

Some Things I Think. I’m bookending this with another collection of quotes. This one comes from an article on Collab Fund by Morgan Housel. There are some pretty insightful observations here. One that stood out to me was:

“Most beliefs are self-validating. Angry people look for problems and find them everywhere, happy people seek out smiles and find them everywhere, pessimists look for trouble and find it everywhere. Brains are good at filtering inputs to focus on what you want to believe.”

Here’s another good one:

“The most valuable personal finance asset is not needing to impress anyone.”

Give it a look. See which ones resonate with you.

Take care, friends. Talk to you soon.