Doing it Forever
I was talking to a close friend of mine recently, and she was explaining how she was going through boxes of stuff that had been around for a long time.
It was time to finally clean house, declutter, reorganize, and, well, spring is also a great time to purge. She was telling me about her amazing packing skills after she went through some of the boxes. Oh look, some letters, a jar of buttons (add a smile, and well…), and a trophy, some clothes, books that were never read, and, oh look, a lamp, and a toilet paper holder. While some people would mark boxes, “bedroom”, “bathroom”, “kitchen”, and have like items placed together, she could have justifiably marked the box “house”. Done!
While some people look at this scenario and go “Wow, how did you live this long?”, “You should be more organized!”, “Why would you keep all this crap?”, “What were you thinking?"... she was actually being organized, in her way! She kept the crap because she thought she might need it later.
She wasn’t “thinking” - she was acting on instinct. She was packing and organizing HER way!
The really cool thing about this is that everything was packed many years ago, and guess what - she is still operating the same way. She got to see for herself that she hasn’t changed despite the time that has gone by and perhaps even despite the attempts to "improve" herself. How she planned, organized, and structured things back then were the same way she was doing them today. Others around her who didn’t understand this strength would make it wrong, unorganized, inefficient, messy, dysfunctional, and send a clear message that what she did was WRONG. Yet she was organized, efficient, and fully functional HER way. She got the opportunity to discover what was RIGHT with her. Everyone organizes; they just do it differently.
The instinctive part of us never changes. We are who we are. It is not learned. It is not inherited. It is not genetic. We do things OUR way. Our ways are not wrong. They are, unfortunately, often misunderstood.