Today, the world’s tallest skyscraper opened in Dubai. It is 2,684 feet tall, with 160 floors. The building has space for 1,044 apartments, 49 floors of office space, as well as an Armani hotel. Supposedly, the 160 floor tower can be seen as far as 59 miles away.
The building was designed by a Chicago based firm. According to one structural and civil engineer with the firm, “We thought that it would be slightly taller than the existing tallest tower of Taipei 101. (Emaar) kept on asking us to go higher but we didn’t know how high we could go. We were able to tune the building like we tune a music instrument. As we went higher and higher and higher, we discovered that by doing that process… we were able to reach heights much higher than we ever thought we could ”
No doubt this building will receive the attention of a lot of people.
Today, is the first Monday of the new year.
Most of us are not beginning the year with a grand opening nor are we making headlines in some way. No, most of us are beginning the week doing the ordinary. We got up this morning and made a cup of coffee just as we do every day. Most will go to work and expect an ordinary day.
Yet, we might use this rhythm of time (this New Year) as an opportunity to pause for a moment and think about the way we have been living (2009) and the way we intend to live (2010).
One question to consider: Do I live in clutter? 
Maybe you know what it’s like to have a home that is cluttered. (No, I haven’t seen your garage.) In the house there might be stacks and piles of things: papers, magazines, and all sorts of gadgets. Rarely is there anything thrown away. Perhaps you have an office. Maybe there are stacks of papers or books on your desk.
Perhaps such clutter is not even an issue for you. Yet, there are many people whose lifestyles are very cluttered. Sometimes we find ourselves so busy that we feel like our lifestyles have become cluttered. When our children were growing up, they were involved in all kinds of extra activities and team sports. There were times when it just got to be too much. They (or we) has said “yes” to too many things. Does this sound familiar?
Some of us may be constantly on the go. Yet, we may not be experiencing any depth at all in our lives. We simply skim the surface, bouncing from activity to the next. People have described such a lifestyle as: “… frustrating; like I can’t breathe; I feel like I’m under constant pressure; whatever I’m doing I feel like I should be somewhere else; I feel trapped; I hear the clock ticking; life is zooming by and I’m missing it.” In his book Margin, Richard Swenson writes:
People are tired and frazzled. People are anxious and depressed. People don’t have time to heal anymore. There is a psychic instability in our day that prevents peace from implanting itself very firmly in the human spirit.
Beware of a cluttered mind that has no sense of purpose or mission.
Peggy Noonan wrote a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal regarding the problem with organizations and institutions that have lost their mission or purpose:
And as all these institutions forgot their mission, they entered the empire of spin. They turned more and more attention, resources and effort to the public perception of their institution, and not to the reality of it.
Everyone gave their efforts to how things seemed and not how they were. Press secretaries, press assistants, media managers, public relations experts—they abound more than ever in our business and public life.
Question
When have you recognized that your life had become cluttered with too many activities, projects, etc.? What was helpful to you in addressing this problem?