Souls are Like Garages

On Garages: a Semi-Rant

A pet peeve of mine (Josh) is messy garages. I was ranting about this to Laine the other day, and an epiphany hit me.

Souls are like garages. Keep yours cleaned the f&$# out.

We are not naturally highly organized people. This is not a rant/post proposing that you itemize, alphabetize, and categorize every one of your possessions, towards living a better life. This is not that kind of post.

However, your garage is made for a specific purpose. We both live in Michigan. It gets cold here. If you have to park your car on the street, or in your driveway, your car gets covered in frost that has to be scraped off with one of the most annoying tools ever created. It also gets covered in snow when it inevitably snows, and regardless of snow or frost, it’s cold in the mornings.

Your driveway is also the safest place for your friends and buddies to park when they come visit you – but if you have to park in the driveway, they have to park in the street.

If you park in a garage, if you use the garage for its intended purpose, you avoid all of this pain.

Garages are for parking. They shouldn’t be filled with cruft and detritus that you don’t need, you haven’t used in years, and you have no real plans to even think about.

Souls are Like Garages

Rant aside, I (Josh) do this too – I have a ton of stuff I keep around “because some day that one thing might happen and I’ll need it then.”

On another part of the scale, when Josh was putting together thoughts for this post, I (Laine) looked at him kind of confused and said that I just get rid of stuff as soon as it gets in my way. This is handy – I am a messy person, but my garage is NOT a mess. However, it also led to me losing my entire collection of CD’s the last time I moved…thanks, Amazon streaming music .

Most of stuff in a messy garage isn’t even accessible. It’s buried. It sits there, with no plan and no purpose – it just takes up space that’s supposed to be for something else. It’s loose ends, and unrealized value. It’s unresolved intentions.

Your soul can become full of stuff too. As awful as stuffed messy garages are, stuffed messy souls are even worse. Your soul is meant to sing with joy, and be full of sunshine (or darkness, or whatever feels you’re feeling).

Your soul is meant to listen for, learn about, and focus on your purpose.

But a bunch of old regrets, broken dreams, snapped relationships, and stabby worries can overwhelm all of that. We hold on to these because we think that we might need them some day. We use them as talismans for the things we’re afraid of.

We think that if we can be aware of all of these things, and exert enough control over them, then we can do it better next time – and we can keep from ever being hurt again.

We try to live without fear by fearing everything that’s ever scared us.

But…we know because science that that’s a bad plan – mostly because it doesn’t work. Instead of never being scared, we end up literally always scared.

So therefore…

Clean out your soul. Look at what’s keeping you from being free and happy. It’s almost never the reality around you – it isn’t your job, or your relationships, or your circumstances. It isn’t the things that you think make you a victim. It’s the choices you make about each of those things, and the way that your particular broken places interact with them. It’s your worry, and your fear, and your attempts to control.

Sometimes, though, you’ll clean out the stuff you can clean out, and you’ll find that you still have random crap in your soul – and that can mean that your reality is in some way part of the problem. If that happens, if your relationships or your job or whatever do actual damage to your soul…then it’s time to take action to fix your reality.

Being a person is hard. Souls take on damage, and they have scars, and they have jagged places that cause new damage every day. When we allow this damage to collect, we end up like a messy garage – we make it so that we can’t be used for our intended purpose.