Previously, on Parshat HaShavua…
The Jewish people escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, received the Torah, built the Mishkan, complained about the food, believed the spies, wandered through the desert, fought a few wars, and spent an impressive amount of time questioning whether leaving Egypt had been a good idea.
TL;DR: Everything you keep becomes something you’re responsible for. Letting go doesn’t erase the past. It creates more room for your future and more capacity to help the people who need you. If you’re ready to start, your first Tidy Together session is $1. [Choose your session here.]
This week, we begin Sefer Devarim, and Moshe starts reviewing the journey.
Why?
Why does so much of the final book of the Torah revisit things we’ve already learned when there’s still so much more we could be learning?
Is Moshe feeling nostalgic? Is he gathering everyone together to reminisce about the good old days before they enter the Land of Israel?
Moshe isn’t reviewing the journey because he wants the Jewish people to relive it.
They need to learn from it before they can move forward.
Moshe knows he’s dying. He won’t lead them into the next chapter, so he reminds them one final time where they’ve been, what went wrong, what G-d has done for them, and who they need to become.
What my own review revealed
Lately, I’ve been feeling far from my authentic self, especially in my business.
Last week, I mentioned that I’m working on a major reorganization of Balagan Be Gone.
As I move through that process, I have to look back at how I structured the business, what worked, what didn’t work, what still belongs, and what needs to change.
Somewhere in that review, I realized that I’m not necessarily on course with my mission.
My job is to help you stay on track with decluttering, managing your time, and reaching your goals.
My mission is to help you live your best life by showing you how easily we can become trapped by our stuff, our need for more stuff, and the belief that we need to buy even more stuff to organize the stuff we already have.
At the same time, I’ve watched people pull back from the work.
Members have told me they’re struggling to schedule their sessions.
Everyone has a reason, and many of those reasons are completely understandable.
Life feels uncertain, time feels scarce, and taking care of ourselves keeps moving lower on the list.
Seeing that has triggered my own feelings of scarcity. It’s also forced me to ask a harder question about my business.
Am I doing enough to help people understand why making this time matters?
Tidy Together isn’t another obligation I want you to squeeze into an already overloaded schedule. It’s time spent reducing the number of things demanding your attention so the rest of your life becomes easier to manage.
If I haven’t made that clear enough, then I’ve drifted from my mission.
A seven-minute discussion about baby clothes
This week, I spent about seven minutes discussing baby clothes with a client during a session.
She doesn’t currently have a baby to pass them on to. Even if she became pregnant today, it would be at least four years before another child could wear them.
These weren’t particularly special or sentimental outfits. She was worried that if she let them go, she might not be able to get what she needed in the future.
I advised her to give them away.
Elastic doesn’t last forever.
The clothes may not be usable by the time she needs them, and in the meantime, they’re taking up space in her home.
I urged her to pass her bracha on to someone who needs them now and trust that G-d will give her what she needs when she needs it in the future.
We went back and forth a few times, and finally, I told her:
“If you decide to keep them, that’s okay, but we need to move forward, and this isn’t worth debating any longer. Know that I’m advising against it, but you do you.”
But her fear deeply affected me because I sometimes feel the scarcity too.
The world feels uncertain right now, and our instinct is often to hold on more tightly.
We save things we might need, buy extras in case they become unavailable, and postpone letting go because we don’t know what will happen next.
Everything we keep becomes a responsibility
Everything we keep becomes something we’re responsible for. It needs to be stored, organized, cleaned, moved, maintained, and eventually decided about again.
Sometimes we genuinely need more storage. More often, we have too much stuff.
Having fewer objects in your home means having less responsibility.
Honestly, I could do with less responsibility.
How about you?
Having less doesn’t change what’s happening in the world, but it does make our homes easier to clean and maintain.
It gives us fewer objects to manage, fewer decisions to make, and more capacity to help other people.
We can cook for soldiers, help a family carrying the enormous strain of miluim, call someone who’s alone, take care of someone’s children, deliver a meal, or notice that another person is struggling.
This is true outside Israel too. There are people in every community who need practical help, emotional support, or someone willing to take one responsibility off their plate.
We can’t help everyone, but we can stop using so much of our limited capacity to care for objects we don’t even need.
Making space to care for one another
That feels particularly important as we enter the Nine Days.
We enter the Nine Days knowing that the Beit Hamikdash was destroyed in part because of how Jews treated one another. If we want to repair what’s been broken, caring for other people can’t remain an abstract idea.
I’m not suggesting that reorganizing a closet will rebuild the Beit Hamikdash.
Maybe it will!?
But reducing the amount we manage at home gives us more capacity to become the people who notice when someone else needs help and are actually able to give it.
Maybe Moshe’s review was sentimental. He was saying goodbye to the people he’d led for 40 years.
But it wasn’t only sentimental.
Looking back isn’t the same as living in the past.
Sometimes we believe we need physical objects to remember where we’ve been. An object may jog a memory, but that doesn’t mean we need to keep every object connected to our past.
Letting go of an object doesn’t mean losing the memory or dismissing what that part of our life meant. We can keep the memories and the lessons without carrying every physical reminder forward.
Letting go makes space for the future.
The Jewish people needed to understand their journey so they wouldn’t carry the same fears and mistakes into their next chapter.
We need to do the same.
A Nine Days closet experiment
The Nine Days may also give you an unusual opportunity to see what you actually use.
TIP: If you follow the custom of not doing laundry during this period, notice what you wear and what remains untouched. If an item stays in your closet even when your choices are more limited, why are you continuing to store and care for it?
As we begin a new book and enter the Nine Days, this is our chance to look back and decide what we don’t want to carry into the next chapter.
What are you holding on to because you’re afraid there won’t be enough?
What’s taking up time and energy that you need for something more important?
Do you want to carry more responsibility for things into your next chapter?
Or do you want to create more capacity for the people and work that matter?
Start with one space
If you’re ready to reduce some of that responsibility, bring one place that feels too full to Tidy Together.
It can be a drawer packed with things you might need someday, a closet filled with clothes that no longer serve your life, or a pile you keep moving because you can’t decide what stays.
During the 55-minute session, we work through three focused 18-minute sprints. You can ask me for help when fear or indecision gets in the way, or work quietly with the accountability of knowing you’re not doing it alone.
You may not finish the entire space, but you can make real decisions, remove things you no longer need, and leave with less to manage than you had when you arrived.
If you’ve never attended Tidy Together, your first session is $1. [Choose your session and decide what you’re ready to stop carrying.]
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