Rope Trick
By Donna McCrohan Rosenthal, East Sierra Branch
If you look up “rope trick,” you’ll find: You touch a length of rope measuring something like 60 feet long or more. As you do, one end rises into the air until the whole hangs perpendicular to the ground. In some interpretations, a magician climbs it to the sky.
Abracadabra.
But a friend of mine recently suggested a different kind of rope trick. It had to do with clutter.
I and I suspect most people have too much of that. When I make the effort to tackle it, I come across notes from old projects completed ages ago – mail that screamed “instant discard” immediately yet stayed in a pile for months; documents I had better file; treasures I’d forgotten I had; and marvelous objets d’heart that I wouldn’t have known where I’d stashed them; and precious misplaced correspondence.
I told myself the other day that I would by gosh go through a carton of saved items under my desk and deal with them. Paper after paper, I couldn’t imagine why I’d kept this one or the next or the next. That said, I did discover an invitation to an event that had slipped my mind and I thrilled at the nick-of-time chance to accept.
Then I pressed on through my what-the-heck-why-this?-stuff, then into broken pens, used Band-Aids, and stained Dixie cups. Oops. Now it dawned on me. I’d done my digging into a box of garbage I’d started specifically to fill with trash.
Fooey.
This brought me back to my friend’s rope trick. “Get a rope,” he’d said. “Not string. A rope, so it commands your attention. Cordon off an area in your home that you plan to clean, not too big, not too ambitious, just realistic.” Then do it all, not even putting aside those bits and pieces that you’ll “get to later” (because you never will if you ignore them). When you finish this sector, do another, then another. Gradually arrives your eureka moment when you can see your tabletop and the corners of your bedroom.
Granted, you haven’t disappeared up a rope into the stratocumuli above.
Nope. You’ve done better.
You’ve made your junk disappear and mastered the rope trick.
Abracadabra.