The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying

Hear me out: it’s the title of a book by Marie Kondo, a Japanese “expert declutterer and professional cleaner” – a book which I have recently read.

Japanese traditional style SAMURAI house / 稲葉家下屋敷(いなばけ しもやしき)

It’s quite different to the usual run of (Western) decluttering books. For a start, there’s her belief that a seven-tatami-mat room (3m/10ft by 4m/13ft) is ample living & storage space for a single person; her habit of greeting the house and thanking her belongings for their service; her almost religious devotion to folding clothes; and of course, the idea that decluttering your house is best done all in one go.

What? I hear you cry. All in one go? Does she not realize how much stuff I have?

On which note, it turns out that Japanese people are not entirely immune from hoarding, despite the overall population density and corresponding lack of space. Examples given include sixty toothbrushes, eighty rolls of toilet paper, and a hundred boxes of cotton buds – with 200 buds in each.

Toiletpaper stilllife

So rest assured, she doesn’t mean that you should sort out everything you own in one day. (Phew!) Six months is more her estimation, starting with easy things like clothes and working your way up to difficult things like photos and keepsakes.

The idea is to sort everything by type, and not put, say, your clothes away – any of them – until you have sorted out absolutely all of them. This makes sense, when you realize that there’s no point organizing how you’re going to store a certain class of object until you know how big that class is going to be.

And here’s the really surprising bit of her claim: she says that if you go through the process properly, imagining how you want your home to be and delving deep into your motivation before sorting it all out, you will never regress. It will be a once-in-a-lifetime purge. Because once you’ve got it the way you want it, you will have the motivation to keep it that way, one presumes.

That's me right now

The thing I really like about her system is the measure for deciding what to keep: does it bring me joy? If not, out it goes. Except tax papers and the like, which, alas, have to be kept regardless of the feelings they inspire.

What do you think? Could you commit to a season of purging the dross from your life – and never look back? What does your ideal feel like – and how does that look?

For myself, I’d like my living environment to be one of simplicity, spaciousness and peace; where both focus and relaxation are possible without the distraction of unfinished jobs, unnecessary items, and unimportant decisions.
As to whether I am prepared to spend the next six months ruthlessly purging all my belongings (my books!) – well, I know better than to sign up for the long term at short notice. But I am certainly considering it.

Where Are You Looking?

At a screen, yes, but where are you looking? Look up. What do you see?

Though I would be the last person to suggest that a human is no more than their body, I do believe that our bodies influence us, perhaps more than we are aware, and in ways we are not aware of.

The environment we choose or create for ourselves is expressive, symbolic – perhaps subconsciously, and perhaps in a code understood only by ourselves, but symbolic just the same.

Dreaming - Nicolaes Maes

I’ve spent the last ten months looking out the window. Not the whole time, obviously, but a lot of the time I spent at my desk this year was spent staring out the window, thinking, dreaming, or just watching in case the postie came past.

Why? Because that’s where I put my desk when it arrived: under the one window in the study, looking out onto the road. But why? Because that’s where it fit without having to move anything around, without having to disrupt the way things were. It was the path of least resistance. As was gazing out the window.

Then this last week, with all the Christmas preparation in full swing (including making old-fashioned steamed puddings), the furniture-moving bug bit. I got the urge to move the desk.
It’s not a small desk (4 1/2′ wide, 2 1/2′ deep & high) and being made of rimu it’s not terribly light, either. Especially when stuffed with stationery. And then there’s the six-foot-tall bookcase full of books and papers (not rimu, but still heavy), and the remarkably heavy easy chair – both of which would have to cross the floor to make room for the desk.

I did it anyway. It was a kind of compulsion. Sometimes you just gotta move furniture.

My desk now faces the wall. To the left of me: books. To the right of me: books. In front of me: pen, paper, corkboard. Work.
It has been a good year, a relaxing year in many ways, but the time for staring out the window has passed. It’s time to get serious (though never, I trust, joyless). This is a place for work.

Paul Barthel Interieur mit Dame am Schreibtisch

What’s in front of you? Where are you looking? What are you secretly saying to yourself?

October: A Sense of Self-Protection

I do not have a problem with alcohol.

"To our beloved King !!"

This became something of a problem itself when I did the Deadlies exercise in the Artist’s Way.  The idea is that you write the following on 7 slips of paper which you then draw from, at random, 7 times: alcohol, drugs, sex, work, money, food, family/friends.

You then list 5 ways in which the drawn word has had a negative effect on your life.  Each time the slip goes back, so it’s even chances for next time.  I drew money/money/alcohol/food/alcohol/food/alcohol.  Apparently if it seems inapplicable, that’s resistance. Right.

I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, particularly with food and alcohol.  The negative effects of food on my life have largely been limited to stomach upsets (I still can’t bear the smell of mango) and the annoyingly large amount of time it takes to ensure meals are regularly prepared and eaten.

rotten mango

Alcohol was even worse.  I might have a glass of wine on occasion – particularly special occasions – but that’s about it.  Fifteen ways alcohol has had a negative effect on my life?  You must be dreaming.  Still, at least I didn’t draw ‘drugs’.  Confessing to a youthful tea addiction wouldn’t take me very far.

What have I learned from this exercise?  Well, besides proving that meaning is not always to be found in randomness, I decided overall that I spend too much time daydreaming and worrying (for what is worry but a dark daydream?) and not enough just enjoying the life I have.

A large part of this chapter of the Artist’s Way looked at workaholism, which is another problem I am happy not to have.  Or do I?  While I certainly don’t have any problem shaking the dust of the DDJ off my feet at 5pm on the dot, I do tend to fill my life with a lot of other doing.

Oh the shame...

Housework, handwork – doesn’t really matter what as long as I can feel guilty for not doing it, or at least for not doing all of it.
I’d secretly like to be a workaholic, it turns out, but I can’t bring myself to actually do all that work.

Nonetheless, I have resolved to be a bit more focussed in what I choose to do in my non-work time.  As with my writing projects, I won’t start any more until I’ve finished at least some of those I have underway, and I’ll try to work steadily on one instead of floating from UFO to UFO.  And I won’t feel guilty for not being able to do everything, which should make what I am doing more enjoyable.

The problem is that I tend to be a bit ambitious in what I can achieve, so my projects often take a long time, even once you take the distraction and procrastination into account.  But not always!  Having decided a couple of weeks ago to make myself a more permanent eye-swathe, I got straight down to the job with a fat quarter (in black and gold) and my sewing machine (also in black and gold).

Singer sewing machine

I used it last Monday (the swathe, not the machine) and achieved about 2,400 words (estimating 200 words on each of 12 pages and not wishing to count them all by hand).  More to come tomorrow, when trouble catches up with our heroine, an unexpected enchantment intervenes, and she uses up her last lifeline.

It’s a public holiday here in New Zealand tomorrow: Labour Day.  Which I shall celebrate by labouring at my chosen profession, instead of the one that feeds me.  It always struck me as strange that we celebrated Labour Day by not labouring.  Very illogical.  As usual, I’ll let you know how I go.

In other news, Tim Makarios of Ideophilus is seeking pledges to fund a Creative Commons audiobook of G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.  Details here, including where you can find a sample of his reading voice – very easy on the ear!  Stop by if you’re a fan of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis (who recommended the book) or Creative Commons works generally.

Until next week, dear readers!
Sinistra Inksteyne hand250