Clearing Out to Bring More In - Inspiration in the oddest places

Today was carpet cleaning day - and all the "stuff" in the house is all over the place.  I really don't like that at all and it's making me crabby.  However, as is my "new world order" - there is an advantage to all this turbulence, and it is causing me to go through some miscellaneous folders removed from their neatly stacked up spot on the office floor.  Old receipts, scrapes of paper, and a big folder full of torn out articles, pictures, etc. that have been preserved for use "someday".  If I have learned anything this summer - it is to clear out the clutter of someday usefulness, give away, throw away and create a fresh start.

Sitting on the floor of the guest bath (while the humidity in the house started to rise with the steam carpet cleaner and the excessive heat outside), I started ruthlessly going through the papers, and was being very good about throwing out that which no longer served.  I liked (she says hopefully in the past tense) to hold on to things, and am actively working on letting things (of all nature) go.  Laughing at the age of some of these papers, it was interesting to recall how much importance was attached to them so long ago.  

Soon, I came to the articles/pictures/quotes pieces.  There was a picture of Angelina Jolie in her full Lara Croft outfit.  Now before there are any questions - it was inspirational at a time when I weighed about 100 pounds more than I do now.  My question was if it was to serve as a visual of a better body - why was the picture stuck in an old icky manila folder? 

The last folder was a variety of interesting artifacts from a cruise of the Mediterrean in 2004.  These objects of great value included used train tickets from Venice to Trieste, receipts from some cafe in Athens, and (literally) 10 postcards of the same picture from the hotel in Venice.  I did find some fun things that are now preserved to go into the scrapebook I'll be making...(and that is the funniest thing I have yet written).   In the last folder, a little scrape of paper fell out and stared me in the face.  It was a quote from Epictetus - a nice Greek boy born in 55 AD and an agent for Stoic ethics (see below for more details).  As I have been considering the next steps in transformation and the emergence from my cocoon  - there has certainly been a lot of "back and forth" about how to go about it.  The quote certainly spoke to that, and as my learning continues - it was suppose to...

"Caretake this moment.  Immerse yourself in its particulars.  Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.  Quit the evasions.  Stop giving yourself needless trouble.
It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now."
Epictetus

Sometimes in the process of letting go - you receive so much more than you "lose"...

Carpe Diem!



Epictetus
A Greek philosopher of 1st and early 2nd centuries C.E., and an exponent of Stoic ethics notable for the consistency and power of his ethical thought and for effective methods of teaching. Epictetus' chief concerns are with integrity, self-management, and personal freedom, which he advocates by demanding of his students a thorough examination of two central ideas, the capacity he terms ‘volition’ and the correct use of impressions.  Heartfelt and satirical by turns, Epictetus has had significant influence on the popular moralistic tradition, but he is more than a moralizer; his lucid resystematization and challenging application of Stoic ethics qualify him as an important philosopher in his own right.