A couple of years ago we moved to a new house. One of the selling points on the home is that it had a double car garage and we were excited to have a place to park during the cold winter months in Logan Utah. We talked about how nice it was going to be to not have to scrape the frost off of the windows in the winter or get into a burning hot car in the summer months. Â I enjoyed parking in the garage for about a month.
Fast forward almost 2 years and I have parked in the garage only a handful of times. First, we had a friend who needed to store a couch for a few weeks before they could move into their new home.  Next, I changed office space and had to move a desk ‘temporarily’ into the garage for safe keeping until I could move it again. Then my wife needed to use the garage as a sort of workshop to do some home upgrades and out came the saws and extension cords. Â
It is amazing how things began to pile up over the course of the next two years. Left-over tile from re-doing the bathroom, an old trolling motor for a fishing boat I no longer own, totes of old clothes the kids have grown out of that we couldn’t seem to let go of for nostalgic reasons, and an array of other items that had become by-products of  the already lived portion of our lives were strewn on top of one another. My garage had become more recognizable as a storage unit than a place to park the cars. Needless to say, I ended up scraping frost off of the windows through the winter after all.
Last week, as a result of purchasing a truck, we decided that it was time clean out the garage and give the space back to the cars it was originally designed to house. My wife, Rhiannon, and I spent the better part of a day working, bickering, remembering old memories, and occasionally laughing as we cleaned out the garage. At the end of the day Rhiannon remarked that it felt soooo good to have all of the clutter cleaned up and moved out. I also noticed an actual physical feeling of lightness and freedom as I pulled our vehicles into their parking spaces.
A client once told me jokingly that there is a direct correlation between the state of someone’s emotions and the condition of their garage. That night as I lay in bed reflecting on the feeling of freedom that had come from cleaning out the garage, my client’s words seemed more true than ever. The thought occurred to me that we often treat the emotional part of our lives much like I had treated my garage.  Sometimes, seemingly harmless or little things happen in our lives that may need attention, but because they either seem small, or we are in denial that they are important we ignore them. Stress at work piles up with a fight with our spouse. The loss of a grandparent gets piled onto worry about a child who is being bullied. We file these things away without ever actually processing them, truly letting them go and moving on. The result is a cluttered mess that leaves us feeling overwhelmed, burned out, empty, and hopeless.
I would suggest the following regular practices as a way to keep ourselves more emotionally clear so that we can have more space to process the emotions of our current lives.
- Take a curious inventory of your emotions on a regular (daily) basis and acknowledge  your own feelings more often. Practicing simple awareness can be a powerful way of keeping your emotional garage clean.
- Reach out to others more often and discuss the experiences and feelings you are having even if they seem unimportant and trivial. It can be very powerful to process your feelings through language and also receive validation from others
- Practice letting go of resentments and regrets. This can be a difficult process, (an online course is in the works) but you can do this as often as you notice those things creeping back into your life. Remember, these things are in the past and will only clutter your current life as you continue to hold on to them.
- If there are some significant traumatic things buried deep inside, consider unpacking them with the help of a therapist who is trained in treating trauma. You need not carry these things on your own, even things you thought you might take to your grave.
It’s now been a few days since we deep cleaned the garage. The good feeling I have returns every time I back my truck into the open space. Yet even as I write these words I think of the drink cooler that I just slid into one of the corners of the garage and the spotting scope I tossed onto the tool bench because I was too tired to put it away over the weekend.  I better make sure to put them where they go when I get home from work tonight.