Deborah Makarios – Page 151

September 2, 2016

Generosity

So, if you’ve followed the last few weeks of fling-along, you are now standing knee-deep in a pile of stuff. Stuff that you have decided you don’t want in your house any more, but – what do you do with it?

Answer: exercise virtue. In this case, generosity.

Give it all away.

This is not to suggest that everything in your pile of stuff is fit to give. Deciding to get rid of something can have the sudden side effect of making you realize just how junky a piece of rubbish it is that you’ve been treasuring all these years. As Tove Jansson wrote in Moominland Midwinter, “Already it looked like something one wouldn’t even have the cheek to give away to a displaced hedgehog” – a displaced hedgehog being defined in the Author’s Note as “a hedgehog that has been removed from its home against its will and not even had the time to pack its toothbrush.”

Be generous to the earth: some things are best donated or otherwise charitably bestowed upon a recycle bin, rubbish bin, or compost bin. (No one else wants your lightly-used teabags.)

Now there are those who will tell you that giving doesn’t count as generosity until you’re giving what you actually want, or need – until it’s really costing you something. I say work your way up. Start with giving away the stuff you’ve already decided you don’t want; then move on to the stuff you wouldn’t mind keeping but to be honest won’t really miss. As you gradually train your subconscious into the pattern of giving, you will build up your generosity muscles to the point where you can give (up) something you really love, because someone else needs it more. Or because doing so will leave you freer to do something else. Or just to prove to yourself that you can, that you own it and not the other way around.

For generosity role-models, consider the mortally wounded Sir Philip Sidney, who gave his water to another wounded soldier.

Or St Francis of Assisi, who had to be put under oath to stop him giving the clothes off his back to those whose poverty was greater. Or, on a cheerier note, Bob, who gave Larry’s hairbrush to The Peach “because he has hair.” Except preferably don’t postpone your generosity until your deathbed (too long to wait). Nor until a singing dancing tomato gives things away for you (even longer to wait).

Just go for it – have a giving spree! No regrets – what you give, give freely and cheerfully. Once it’s out of your hands, let it out of your heart and mind as well. It’s not yours any more – not your thing, not your responsibility, not your problem. Enjoy yourself! Generosity really is one of those virtues which does as much good to the person exercising it as to those around them.

I regret to inform you that this concludes our regular programming for a while (though who knows what irregularities may crop up?) as we have just moved house and I must devote myself to unpacking, locating my desk and so forth. Don’t worry, I won’t be gone long, and when I return we will turn our attention to such interesting questions as the naming of houses and whether or not I am in fact Cruella de Vil. Au revoir!

August 29, 2016

To Give or To Receive…

…that is the question. No, really: that is the question this week. One of Jesus’ more famous sayings is “It is more blessed to give than to receive” – but which do you prefer?

August 26, 2016October 20, 2017

Round 3: Knock-Out!

Or to relieve your feelings, kick-out (the Marquess of Queensberry need not apply. Nasty fellow).

Today we are going to be executing a purge in that room of waking hours, the living room. I have never understood why FlyLady puts the living room in the fifth week of the month with her zones, thus ensuring that it almost never gets a full week’s worth of attention.

I don’t generally need a whole week each month to declutter and clean my bathroom, for example. The bathroom in the house we’re moving to is about 2×3 metres (if so much) and contains one bath, one basin (hanging on the wall) and one toilet. Storage is limited to a small cupboard built into the wall, and the windowsill. Of course, since that’s the only bathroom in the house, I could call it the “master bath” (Zone 4) and give the living room some more time and why didn’t I think of that before?

The living room in our new house will serve us for workspace (we both work at home), relaxation area, entertaining area and book storage. It is the largest room in the house. It needs to be. Half a week is not enough.

Today, however, we are going to have a stab at the stashes of stuff that build up in that most-used of rooms. What you have in your living room depends on what you use it for. Besides furniture you may have books, “media”, games, hobby stuff, paperwork, collections, magazines/newspapers, and items left on display such as photos, china and little decorative doodads. And that’s before we venture into any storage areas the room might have.

So feel free to adapt my suggestions to suit your own circumstances.

First up, the media. CDs, DVDs, LPs, videos, cassette tapes… Yep, I have all of these, although I must admit that the older a technology is the more likely it is that I have recently pruned it. That said, I’m sure there are a few items I could do without packing, moving and unpacking again. Let’s see what fifteen minutes can do.

I scored: one DVD, one video, 4 cassette cases (no idea what happened to their contents), 4 CDs and 10 LPs. Total of 20, and a relatively painless extraction at that. Phew – and onwards!

Next up: the books. Of which we have a great many. I haven’t counted them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran into the four digits. A large percentage of them were bought second-hand, which should make them easier to move on – but on the other hand also makes them easier to acquire, because they cost less. Still, there’s no use keeping a book you aren’t going to read again, unless it’s the sort you don’t really read as such, like a dictionary. I have read encyclopædia volumes in my time; I don’t think I’ve ever been quite desperate enough for reading material to embark on a cover-to-cover dictionary-a-thon.

Fifteen minutes on the clock….. and five books pulled out of the shelves, including philosophy, Elizabethan plays and the poetry of Robert Browning. Running total 25. Even if you don’t prune much, going through your library book by book will at least serve to remind you of all the good books you’d forgotten you still had and would now like to read again.

For the third course, following the light media appetizer and the rather stodgier main course of books, I thought we would end with a delicate bibelot or two – what my grandmother called “dustcatchers.” Depending on the level of decoration you prefer, this may take less than fifteen minutes, even if you wander into every other room in the house, but it’s worth doing. We get so used to seeing things sitting there on the shelf or the mantelpiece or the little end table that we stop consciously seeing them, which is a complete waste. You can also look at things hanging on the walls – pictures, paintings, posters etc. I would, but I’ve already taken ours down and packed them.

Fifteen minutes of knick-knackery, doo-daddery and decorative items – go!

I collected one clock (deceased), one origami crane (pink), one origami elephant (ditto), a vase full of peacock feathers, a small plastic dome with tiny flowers in it, a harmonica, a somewhat decorative box and a silver candlestick (badly tarnished). Total of 8; grand total 32 – more than the previous two weeks put together!

Putting them all together, though, I get 13 + 16 + 32 = 61! Sixty-one fewer items than I possessed a few short weeks ago, and all done in nine sets of fifteen minutes. For the statistically minded among you, that’s 135 minutes, or just over 2.2 minutes per item removed. So if you have five minutes to spare to consider your possessions, you can expect to find a couple to get rid of. Ten minutes, four items. Fifteen minutes, six items. Half an hour, twelve. A whole hour? Eighteen and a cup of tea.

All this is completely theoretical, of course – one person’s brief experience is hardly enough to base a rule on, even a rule of thumb (everyone’s thumb is different – ask Bertillon). But it’s worth remembering that even a short snatch of time can make a permanent difference. There are sixty-one things that I didn’t like or didn’t want or didn’t use (or all of the above) which took up space in my house and never paid rent or contributed anything – they just were. And now they aren’t, and I feel good about that.