Junk Drawer

It is always so amazing how there are common things that all human beings have in their lives. I was in the kitchen yesterday and I pulled open the junk drawer to get a rubber band.

I realized at that moment that we all have junk drawers. Typically they are in the kitchen though many of us have more than one junk drawer. It is that place where everything ends up. If we don't know where to put something, we throw it in the junk drawer.

But I maintain that this is also a part of our lives. We have areas of our life that are veritable 'junk drawers.' When my father passed away in 2008, there were a number of things that we had to take care of because of deadlines or requirements. There were also a whole list of items that we just did not know what to do with. (Yes, I will end a sentence with a preposition now and then!). So all these items went into three boxes and then went into a cupboard in the garage. Suddenly I had a 'junk drawer' portion of my life around my dad's stuff. It took me another five years to get that cleared out and I had to finally take extra steps in a conscious way to do so.

Thus becomes a question for each of us? Where are the junk drawers in our journey? Where are the dams that have stopped parts of how we show up? We all have them. We hid them in a portion of our mind and don't think about them too often. Then we take a class or have a change in our life; suddenly it is time to tear down the dam and establish some clarity in another part of our life.

I believe we all have the ability to take care of all the questions in our life; the answers are within us. I think it is always a case of shining the light of discovery on the dark place where we have hidden in our junk drawers.

We can also get caught up attaching shame to our junk drawers. In truth, there is no shame for it is what it is! It is.in our heads we hear the voice of our parents asking "How could you do that; you need to be an adult and take care of that."

So in the process of the 12-step recovery it talks about taking an inventory and that is the challenge. I try on a weekly basis to pick one of my 'junk drawers" and clean out. Right now I am looking at my 'in' box above my computer. It is stuffed to the gills. It is also time to pull it all out and clean it up. It's a dam of information from all over stuck in one place - and I don't have much idea what is in it. This is one I will do in the next couple days. I will then feel lighter; I will then feel lighter; I will feel clearler and I will have another working area in my life.

In the end, there is nothing wrong with having a junk drawer. But I believe there should be just one and it should be in the kitchen. I also believe it should organized now and then. Check out your junk drawer and clean it. '