I must admit, I have a lot of respect for Eminem. His lyrics are hard and explicit at times, but honest and true to the bone. There are a couple of songs where he deals with different things. For example, in “Beautiful” he speaks about how hard, but also how important it is to be yourself. This article was heavily inspired by Eminem’s “Cleaning out my Closet” song, because in this song he raps about the struggles and hard times he went through in his life. And there were a lot of problems and setbacks.

So, I decided that this is the first Christmas/New Year’s Eve that I’ll be spending with cleaning out my own personal closet.

Some of you may find it strange that I don’t do any thing more entertaining and social during these special holidays … Let me explain why the time spent on this apparently boring activity is among the best investments of my life.

If you only live your life to get things done, you may pass away without leaving anything of significance behind you. By simply jumping from task to task, you can literally spend an entire life without finding the time to do something that actually matters to you and the world. Only by living your life with a purpose, is when you can experience the full happiness. Meaningless tasks come and go, but a final purpose will determine you to focus on achieving it, on making those choices that serve this goal and not those ones that make you drift away from it.

This is why an examined life is a life worth living. This is the life in which you try to discover the hidden and untangled part of yourself which resembles a pantry or a closet.

You can hide the mess by closing the doors, but you’ll know there might come a day when your closet will simply burst because of all the stuff you stacked inside without even caring. If you open the closet of your soul and clean it, everything will come to light and you are going to have a better image of who you really are, what you want from life, and what purpose higher than yourself you feel you are here to serve. Too bad many of us are afraid of opening these doors in case everything would tumble out, making a mess in our life. Ask yourself this question:

Have you ever had this feeling that life is overcrowded and overwhelming at times?

You may have plenty of things to do, yet feel like something is missing. That’s how I felt most parts of my life. Now, the next important question to ask yourself:

How to start the change in your soul?

I think of the closet analogy in order to come up with a plan which is based on a solid foundation, a foundation you can build on. This foundation should be your real dreams and desires, on the most important achievement you want to leave behind.

First step: Empty your closet to start all over.
When you have an empty closet, you can fill it with anything you want. You can manage it as you wish. Your mind is like this closet: if you empty it of past concerns, worries, regrets and other similar things, you make it ready to receive new things, to embrace a new way of living, new ideals and a life purpose worth following at all costs.

Quiet reflection is necessary for you to empty this virtual closet which is your mind. If you can find just 15 to 20 peaceful minutes without interruption or distractions, it would be enough. Turn of your cell phone, shut down Facebook and Twitter. Just use pen and paper rather than a computer, because hand writing helps stimulating creativity and introspection.

Set an alarm to go off at 20 minutes, then sit down and write everything you would like in this life … in your life! Write about what you would like to become if you were not afraid, write about friendships, possessions, skills and experience. Don’t forget your relationships, your health and your personal growth. Write about what you would like to study, what would you like to master and where you would like to be in 5, 10 or 20 years time. Allow yourself to dream. It doesn’t matter if some things you write seem impossible to achieve. Jut put them to paper.

Start putting things back into your closet.
It’s easy to put things back in an empty and clean closet. You can arrange it as you wish, by size, by color or by season. Your mind works the same way. Whatever doesn’t fit anymore has to go. What works will stay, but everything will get a special place that will help you know at any given time what’s inside your closet. The first thing to let go are other people’s mistakes and demands. Don’t regret things that are beyond of your control. Learn from these mistakes but don’t sweat over them. They are here only to serve your personal growth purpose and not to hold you back from pursuing the things you long for.

You should be able to put maximum 20 things back in your closet. They will belong to various categories of your life: Personal, Family/Relationships, Health, Career/Work, and Spiritual/Creative. I like to use different colors to represent each category. Now, rank your items and put the most important at the top and the least important at the bottom of each list.

Take a look at your paper and try to see what catches your eye first in each category?
What makes your heart beat a little faster?
What are you irresistibly attracted to pursue?

Tell your story and live it!
Now it’s time to turn your list into a story. Put together a narrative containing what you have accomplished over the past five or ten years. Position yourself in the future in this narrative. It will be your vision which seemed so hard to reveal before. This will be the time when you are going to have it in front of your very eyes.

You are going to dream about this vision of yours for the next five or ten years. Keep all good habits, develop new ones and be wise enough to know which habits serve your purpose and which don’t.

Pay attention at things and people around you. Be happy for each moment with your family, for each smile of your closest friends, for each kiss from your cat or dog. Eat good food, keep yourself healthy and fit and pay attention to each and every moment of your life, while doing everything in line with your final goal.

This will be your legacy!

It’s by slowing down that we can enjoy our journey … and it starts with cleaning out your closet.

Picture credit: Liz • Creative Commons Attribution