By Vicki Norris –
The Pruning Principle™
Do you have a lot of stuff accumulating around your house or office? Are you stashing and stuffing simply because you have too much junk and don’t know where to put it? I call all this extraneous stuff “overage.” In my experience as a professional organizer, I’ve found that our overage is causing us to move (just to get away from it), shop (ironically, because we don’t want to be in our buried homes), and purchase larger homes (to contain all of our overage).
The Pruning Principle™ is a principle you can apply in any room of the home, at the office, and even in your schedule to deal with your overage.
Something about eliminating useless stuff just feels right. When we disentangle dead branches from a growing tree, we pull out the matter that is no longer good. When we cut back the yellowed reeds of a perennial flower, we know that its energy returns to the bulb. Ridding plants of the superfluous material makes us feel good about restoring them to health.
That kind of trimming feels good for a reason. Cutting out that which isn’t useful in our life is a spiritual experience! The Bible applies the metaphor of pruning to our spiritual life. Jesus explains: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” (John 15:1-2). Here we see that the gardener’s purpose for cutting out deadwood and pruning back living stock is to produce more life and fruit. We shouldn’t be surprised that spiritual principles prove true in our experience of the physical world as well.
The Pruning Principle is this: We will flourish in our personal, spiritual, and physical life when we expose ourselves and our environment to frequent pruning. Organizing, then, is not simply sorting, categorizing, and tossing, as many believe. Authentic organizing includes a purposeful and ongoing process of elimination and refinement. It’s a perspective before it is an activity.
So, how do we apply this principle to gain a more organized life?
Now, applying The Pruning Principle in your life doesn’t mean that you must throw everything away. A lot of people fear organizing because they think it will involve parting with their favorite things. On the contrary, I advocate being surrounded by those special treasures and collections that you love and I never prod anyone to toss anything unless they’re ready to do so. The Pruning Principle allows you to zoom out and gain perspective. It allows you to see the relative value of your belongings and your time in relation to other more important things.
I hope you can take this therapeutic principle and run with it. As you prune back your space, belongings, and time, may you bear more fruit and strive for what is ahead!
Adapted from: Reclaim Your Life™ copyright © 2007 by Vicki Norris (available now at www.RestoringOrder.com. Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR. Used by permission.
About the Author: Vicki Norris is an expert organizer, business owner, speaker, television personality, and author who inspires people to live out their priorities. Norris is a regular on HGTV’s nationally syndicated Mission: Organization, and is a recurrent source and contributor to national lifestyle publications including Quick & Simple magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, and Real Simple magazine. Norris is also author of Restoring Order™ to Your Home, a room-by-room household organizing guide.