The Life-Changing Magic of Hurricane Michael

Lately all you see on the internet is Marie Kondo this, Marie Kondo that.  If you don't know who she is, Marie Kondo wrote a bestselling book entitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014) and stars in a new Netflix series called Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.  The essence of Kondo's KonMari philosophy is to keep only that which "sparks joy," and that decluttering your possessions will improve your life.  Full disclosure: I downloaded the book in 2015, but it sits unread in my Kindle app.  I was too busy with all of my clutter to read it if you want to know the ugly truth.

The cleaning out necessitated by Hurricane Michael damage got us going and now we are cleaning out our entire house.  Every cabinet, closet and drawer.  I am appalled by how much stuff we have accumulated over the last 20 years that we don't need, or for that matter, even want.  There's no room for the stuff we love.  Just cleaning out the kitchen cabinets yielded the equivalent of a fully equipped kitchen....things we never used and things we forgot we even owned.

The hurricane taught me an important lesson: what we can't live without and what we need are not always the same thing as what we want.  We are all tidying up, right?  Hurricane Michael did a lot of the work for us-- maybe too well. He didn't have to go so hard in the paint on us, we were happy with our clutter thank you so very much.  

But you know what? There was an awful lot of stuff in my kitchen that sparked absolutely no joy in me whatsoever. Now that entire extra kitchen we had jammed in our cabinets is on its way to a new owner who needs it, and that surely does. 

And that is magic.

Happy Saturday, I'm gonna go clean out a cabinet.*

XOXO

Julie

*Should go without saying but just in case to be clear, I'd take my ridiculously jampacked kitchen cabinets, gross shed, and embarrassingly disorganized garage all back in a heartbeat if it meant no hurricane, 43 people would still be alive, and thousands of people would still have a home or a business and a job.

My firm website:

Isler & Sombathy, P.A.

Follow me on Social Media:

Facebook

Twitter

Legal Stuff

Copyright Julie Ann Sombathy 2019 All Rights Reserved

The Broken Places

In 1918, Ernest Hemingway briefly worked for the Red Cross on the Italian Front of WWI as an ambulance driver.  In 1929 his novel about a young American on the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms, was published. Hemingway’s writing style, perhaps more than any other American author of the early 20th Century, defined the ethos of his generation. He was a master of words, brief and long form. An urban legend exists that he wrote the saddest short story ever on a bet, comprised of exactly six words:  “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It is a matter of great debate whether or not this story is true, but the fact that Hemingway could say more with less is indisputable. 

A Farewell to Arms contains a single paragraph that in less than a page drops more truth about love, life, depression, death and the vagaries of fate than some authors manage in an entire novel. Nestled in that paragraph is a line I’ve been thinking about a lot since the hurricane: 

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” 

Panama City is broken.  The place we call home is in pieces. My neighbor said as much to me last night: “everything is broken.”  Every day I drive down Harrison Avenue and there’s a new empty lot where a building used to stand.  The psychological beat down one takes every day just going about their usual business is immense.  There’s no escaping the destruction.  It is everywhere. The landscape has changed. Lives are changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same.  That right there—the knowledge that there is a before and an after and no other option—that takes a piece of your heart. 

But being broken is not the end of things:  even bone is strongest at its broken point during the healing process.  Cracks let the light shine through. The Gospel of John says “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”  Our broken pieces are just letting new light in; it is going to be different for sure but whether it is better is still up to us. 

We can let this adversity overcome us, or we can prevail and be strong at the broken places.   

My firm website:

Isler & Sombathy, P.A.

Follow me on Social Media:

Facebook

Twitter


Legal Stuff

Copyright Julie Ann Sombathy 2019 All Rights Reserved