"Most of us don't need more to be happy - we need less."

Funnily enough, the title I chose for this post is a quote from an inspiring video I received from a very special person which I actually watched after I had already composed this piece and its message was this, to be happy can sometimes mean to have less and thus, we must do away with the unimportant things in our lives.

We should get rid of the useless clutter.

Useless Clutter.

Automatically, my mind wanders to the obvious, the floor or lack of rather, in my bedroom since over the course of the last couple of months, I've finished college, packed and unpacked a holiday suitcase and have begun the process of gathering all of my belongings to move countries. On top of that mess there is of course, at least 86 empty water bottles, wasted blue pens and an abundance of random poly-pockets which have taken over every last inch of wood on my bedroom floor.

Who’d have known that playing hopscotch in Junior Infants was to prepare us for trying to get in and out of our rooms in the future?

And of course, I’m provoked to think about how I’m asked, approximately seven thousand, two hundred and sixty-three times a week, “Do you really need this?” “Is that useful anymore?” “That’s just causing clutter, can’t you throw that out?” and the most famous of all, “This place looks like a bomb has hit it, I’m sick of it.” (That’s one figure of speech that I cannot stand since having the pleasure of studying Leaving Cert History as I can assure you all, no empty blue bic pens or flashcards were found on the site in Vietnam, 1963.)

However, *plot twist* none of these things are what I’m going to be writing this piece about, because my opinion on this concept of “useless clutter” really has nothing to do with a messy room, or a messy wardrobe or anything physical to be honest.

I am going to scratch beneath the surface for a minute and discuss how I believe the “Useless Clutter” that is a feature of many aspects of our lives, is in fact USEFUL clutter. Please try to stay with me; don’t roll your eyes and ask yourself if I am completely delirious just yet.

The remarkable poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.” This quote sprung to mind instantly when I started thinking about this and again when I read the aforementioned quote about de-cluttering our lives because it sums up my viewpoint on this topic so perfectly.

We’re all human.

Some days are harder than others, you know when the alarm goes off at 7.30am and you hide your head under the duvet and beg yourself to have 5 more minutes, we don’t want 5 more minutes of warmth or of sleep because quite frankly, if you wake up in the mornings and aren’t BURSTING to go to the bathroom then you, my dear, deserve a badge of some sort. In fact, we are hiding from life itself, we want 5 more minutes before we have to face the day to day quagmires, or 5 more minutes of looking at nothing as opposed to looking at the overwhelming hustle and bustle on the streets of Dublin.

Think back for a moment to how when you used to (or still do) sit in school staring at the whiteboard which we often deemed to have been filled with a load of ‘useless clutter.’ After 40 minutes it gets wiped clean, and it has to be said, it has usually taught us something; we can’t mentally un-see what we’ve just seen. We can’t just wipe the things in our heads away with a rag.

Society, social media and the trend of negativity that disillusions so many of us nowadays, including myself, will tell you to believe everything you see, and encounter is useless, force you to dwell on it in the most pessimistic way possible, and thus allowing everything to clutter your mind.

Well, if you do that, then you’re the bigger fool to succumb to this idea of uselessness.

Perhaps you did see something awful today, maybe you sat in maths (like I did most days) and felt like your brain was about to combust from looking at all the ridiculous numbers not making any sense in front of you.

But, if you train your mind to find something good, you’ll realise, things may be slightly discombobulated but if you learned something, if you grew, even in the smallest of ways then there’s something worth being happy and cheerful about.

THE BIN. When I was in Primary School, I remember amongst ourselves we would work out a, “paring our pencils rota” just to ensure enough people put their hands up and asked to go to the bin to distract from our Geography lesson. I never was a fan. I still wouldn’t be able to fill in the map of Ireland.

Then as we got older and “cooler” (or so we thought - God loves a trier) we would write ‘useless’ notes to each other, non-sensical ones, just to feel like we were doing something the teacher didn’t know about, it gave us a little sense of joy, we may have been causing clutter, it may have been untidy activity but it certainly made us cheerful.

Update: every teacher, ever, also tried our tricks in their youth – we were caught. Every. Single. Time.

Our little notes would be scrunched up and thrown into the bin.

Then we got to Secondary School, post-it notes were the “in” thing, the bins would look like a captured rainbow.

My point here is, those bins are emptied every day.

The papers don’t matter anymore, they don’t stick around.

The Greyhound trucks come along and that’s the end of it.

But, why do we notice all those ripped up papers? If we are courageous enough to admit it, those little shreds of papers are, on a metaphorical level, our thoughts going around and around in our heads, trying to distract us from the important things in everyday life and skew our outlook on pretty much everything.

The reality is, there is no Greyhound truck that comes into our minds and abolishes all the little crumpled up pieces of paper in our head. Therefore, it is our responsibility to find the use in all these thoughts, how are we growing from them.

Recycle the bad pieces of paper in your mind for the good.

Although I have always been aware of the importance of mental health and have always advocated for mental health support services. I have recently personally experienced the many trials and tribulations mental health can cause for an individual and the importance of talking about it has been amplified for me. We need to give ourselves the power to change how we see things, how we feel about things, and I think we would all be a little bit better off if we realised that nothing and nobody is useless, perhaps it is the overuse of the word useless that causes people to feel useless themselves, maybe the word useless and all its synonyms, worthless, purposeless, pointless (the list is never-ending) is what renders in us having those overflowing bins of papers, or thoughts rather, cluttering our minds.

What if we spoke about clutter being useful? How the negative thoughts or inability to see life clearly and wanting to hide under the duvet are the experiences that are going to lead to us appreciating life, appreciating happiness?

Whether the mess is in your bedroom, your locker, your work desk or your mind, things are going to continue, it may seem awful, but no mess or clutter is ever useless, and neither is any person, there’ll always be a cheerful factor that overrides everything else if you’re strong enough to look for it. I’m no professional nor can I preach about being positive 100% of the time because firstly, that’s unattainable and secondly, I am still working on having healthy thoughts too. But, if this piece can alter how even one person thinks about clutter, how someone reacts to the word useless, or even just make you smile thinking about school nostalgia, then I will be ecstatic.

No matter what the clutter or mess in your brain might be making you feel, remember that if you’re feeling something, you’re alive and that’s the most cheerful thing in the whole entire world.

- If anybody who has read this is feeling like they’re drowning from their own thoughts, please remember that things will get better. Help is there and please reach out for it. It’s the best decision you will ever make. You are not useless, you are important, you are beautiful, and you are wonderful.