Living an Edited Life: Minimalism Meets the Enneagram

For a couple of years, I’ve followed a person whose message is minimalism. He blogs about all the stuff you and I accumulate that no longer serves us. Clutter.

His messages make me think about getting rid of stuff. Some of you may have these thoughts too. Waves of guilt followed by inaction.

A few years ago, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing expert, who has a TV series on Netflix. After reading her book, I took everything out of my closet, even took pictures with my camera and posted on my website the whole cathartic 2-day process. 

“Make everything earn its place,” my daughter said. Get rid of everything else.

Guess what? Today, my closet needs a clean-out again. 

There is no such thing as “once and done” when it comes to dealing with things that have outlived their purpose or potential usefulness. 

Part of my journey relates to why I hold on to stuff. It’s uncanny how many times my kids or grandkids come to me first before going to buy something they need. As they leave, I repeat these words. “I am not a store.”

Last weekend, my granddaughter came over wanting to crochet a hat for her cat. She guessed that I would have some yarn and crochet hooks, and she was right. Even though I had given away a ton of yarn and knitting and crochet needles, I kept a small bag, “just in cases” (movie quote).

Doing My Soul Work

“How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important . . . it’s not something we [accomplish] and then check off our list. It’s life work. It’s soul work.”

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

A conversation with several friends related to those of us who LOVE boxes. Each of us admitted we hoard empty boxes. Ironically, that’s one of the first things the people who preach how to simplify life tell other people to get rid of. But that’s not easy for those of us who LOVE boxes. 

Years ago, when my husband and I still lived in Pampa, he cut up one of my boxes to cover a vent in the pantry, to keep out the winter cold. I threw a fit. Because as it happened, this box was my favorite box. 

He said, “There’s a dad-gum box convention in the basement and you’re upset because I cut up one of your boxes.”

While I tried to explain what was special about that particular box, I could not stop laughing about the “box convention.”

As of today, I have made some progress. I do keep fewer boxes. I mail far fewer packages.

Still, clutter accumulates the way dust bunnies hide under chairs.

The clutter. The stuff. I admit that things get in the way of living a simplified life, giving me more bandwidth, more space, more room for what I truly love. 

Only I see a parallel between the clutter in my closets and the clutter in my mind that can hinder my relationships and my purpose in life. This is soul work.

“Next to God, the greatest mystery in our life is ourselves.”

Ian Cron

In 2017, I read The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery by Ian Cron. I couldn’t have known or even guessed that the wave of all things Enneagram would reach so far or hold the interest of so many for so long. (link to my previous post about the Enneagram).

The Enneagram is a system of identifying personality types, which seeks to identify the WHY behind emotional reactions and responses. 

As to the why I keep stuff, I have an approach-avoidance conflict. It goes back to childhood, when leaving behind possessions with every move made with my gypsy-spirited mother, I felt loss on an emotional level.

Once, when my daughters helped me clean out a closet, my youngest daughter held an item so close to my face, I backed away. I couldn’t tell what it was.

She said, “What is this?!” challenging me for holding on to it. Quick to answer her own question, she added, “Oh, I forgot. You lived through the Depression. Wait! That wasn’t you!” And we both bent over with laughter turning to tears.

No excuses, I still recall the loss of things that childhood me cherished in order to have room for my mother’s books. Today, I understand the value Mom had placed on her books.

“Oh Bother” (Winnie the Pooh)

It’s not simply the stuff in our closets or basements or attics, or storage sheds or garages that have accumulated, that you and I can pass by without seeing because we have lived with stuff for so long, closing in.  

We also accumulate patterns of behavior, ways you and I react to people, to situations, to changing circumstances. The strategies we have adopted to make ourselves feel SAFE during childhood corresponds to a dominant personality type that describes unconscious motivations for the way we typically act, think, and feel now.

“The shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of [our authentic self] at all. Instead we live out of all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

Frederick Buechner

Cron’s book about the Enneagram takes readers on a journey of discovery back to a person’s authentic self. 

“We don’t know ourselves by what we get right; we know ourselves by what we get wrong.”

Ian Cron

Thinking about what I get wrong brings together minimalism and the Enneagram and applies today to the need to edit my life in order to apprehend that for which God has apprehended me.

I want to keep growing and keep going till I’m gone, which means soul work. I need to keep clearing out the clutter. In my closets. And in my head.