CLEAN YOUR ROOM - Уберись в своей комнате.

Мощный жизненный совет от клинического психолога №1 в мире Джордана Питерсона, объясняющий важность уборки с психологической точки зрения.

Powerful Life Advice | Jordan Peterson 

Imagine you're dealing with someone who’s hoarding. People who are hoarding are often older, neurologically damaged, or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. You walk into their house and there are 10,000 things in there. There are maybe a hundred boxes, and you open up a box. Inside, there are some pens, some old passports, some checks, their collection of silver dollars, some hypodermic needles, some dust, and a dead mouse. There are boxes and boxes like that in the house. It’s absolute chaos, not ordered chaos. You think, is that their house? Is that their being? Is that their mind? The answer is, there’s no difference.

So, I could say if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room if that would be easier because maybe you’re a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do. So you go clean up under your bed, make your bed, and organize the papers on your desk. Then you think, what exactly are you organizing? Are you organizing the objective world or your field of being, your field of total experience? Jung believed, and I think there's a Buddhist doctrine nested in there, that at the highest level of psychological integration, there's no difference between you and what you experience. You might think, well, I can’t control everything I experience, but that’s no objection because you can’t control yourself anyway. The mere fact that you can’t extend control over everything you experience is no argument against treating that as an extension of yourself.

Let's say you have a long-standing feud with your brother. Is that a psychological problem? Is that him? Is it a problem in the objective world, or is it a problem in your field of being? It’s useful to think that way because you might ask what you could do to improve yourself. The first question might be why should you even bother improving yourself? The answer is something like, so you don’t suffer more stupidly than you have to, and maybe so others don’t have to either. It’s not some casual self-help doctrine. If you don’t organize yourself properly, you’ll pay for it in a big way, and so will the people around you. You might say, I don’t care about that, but that's not true. You actually do care because if you’re in pain, you will care about it. It's very rare to find someone in excruciating pain who would say it would be no better if they were out of it. Pain brings the idea that it would be better if it didn’t exist along with it.

So, get your act together so there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary. The question then might be, how would you go about getting your act together? This is a phenomenological idea: look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. You can do this in a room. It's fun to do. Sit in a room, maybe your bedroom, and meditate on it. Think, if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? Ask yourself that. It's not a command; it’s a genuine question, and things will pop out in the room that you could fix. There's a stack of papers that’s bugging you. Maybe a little order there would be good. There's some rubbish behind your computer monitor you haven't attended to for six months. The room would be better if it were less dusty and the cables weren’t tangled.

If you consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment, there will be all sorts of things you could fix. If you were coming to see me for psychotherapy, the easiest thing for us to do first would be to get you to organize your room. You think, is that psychotherapy? The answer is, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being. I would say start where you can start. If something announces itself to you as in need of repair that you could repair, then fix it. Fix a hundred things like that, and your life will be a lot different.

I often tell people to fix the things they repeat every day. People think of those as trivial, but they constitute 50% of your life. People think they're mundane and don't need attention. No, that's wrong. The things you do every day are the most important things you do, hands down. A hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being, and there's a lot less rubbish around and fewer traps to step into. Once you've got your mind and emotions together and are acting that out, you can extend what you consider yourself and start fixing up things that are part of your broader extent. It's an interesting thing to do.

I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat. Go back to where you live and think, I’m going to make this place better for half an hour. What should I do? You have to ask, and things will pop up. Your mind is a strange thing. As soon as you give it a genuine aim, it will reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. That’s how you see to begin with. If you set a task, especially if you’re genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and act consistently, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim.

You see what you aim at. If you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of being in university, it should be that you see what you aim at. An inference you might draw from that is to be careful what you aim at. What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you. If the world is manifesting itself very negatively, ask if you’re aiming at the right thing. I’m not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons. There’s a random element to being, for sure. So you don’t want to take that phrase too far. You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people, but it’s still a great thing to ask.