One of my continuing interests has always been what the physical objects which we create and with which we surround ourselves say about us, both as individuals and as a society.
Who does not walk into someone else’s living space and eye the collection of books, or music, or video to help form some opinion of the person who lives there?
Our possessions are both archival (what we treasure about our pasts) and aspirational (what we hope to accomplish in our future). When we feel overwhelmed by our possessions, a need to purge them, it’s evidence that we need to move on from some impediment, some shackle to the past or illusory future.
People tend to foist stuff on us (think spam mail) and we find it hard to say no. Tidying up is the physical first step to regaining our sense of self, to assessing our own true needs and desires.
In writing these little meditations on “what we keep”, I came across Marie Kondo and her konmari method for taking control of clutter. Her method is far closer to my own than say, the Puritan-style “Clutterers Anonymous”. Cleaning isn’t about focusing on what to get rid of, on shaming people to get rid of their stuff. (Apparently so they can buy new stuff and keep the consumerist economy going.) No. No. No. It’s about focusing on what to keep, those things that bring us delight.
When I sit here drinking my tea, I consider my cup. And yes, it brings me delight. Because I was quite poor in my youth, I always spent a great deal of time carefully weighing the characteristics of any purchase until finding just the thing that brought that spark of delight. If I didn’t find it, I didn’t buy it. (For example, I didn’t own a couch until my late 30s).
When I look at my tea cup, I also think of the Japanese tea ceremony, which is about truly appreciating (paying attention to) the present moment, the radiance of the ordinary. Every time I look at this cup it makes me happy. I just have to remember to look.
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So ends my long introduction to the linked story which examines the KonMari Method from the perspective of an economist. I think it will be interesting to those of you who prefer a less lyrical explanation.
The Atlantic: An Economist’s Guide to Tidying Your Apartment
GPlus Discussion
May 16, 2015
The Maaurovingian
+5
Your introduction is quite lovely though.
May 16, 2015
Jonas Neergaard-Nielsen
+2
Indeed, I enjoyed your introduction!
Nicely phrased: Our possessions are both archival (what we treasure about our pasts) and aspirational (what we hope to accomplish in our future).
Would you care sharing a picture of your teacup with us, or is it too personal?
May 16, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+3
+Jonas Neergaard-Nielsen I’ve been writing a little series on this topic of “what we keep” and intend to write about many specific objects in my life as part of that series. So the teacup is bound to appear. (I actually have quite a few. Living in Japan encouraged the idea of seasonal and unmatched dinnerware. I’m using my Spring-themed cup which was a gift I received when I attended a wedding of two colleagues.)
Now that Google+ has implemented Collections, I will probably put all these posts into a Collection.
May 16, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+5
+paul beard One of the things I found quite unsettling when I merged households with someone was living among things I had not chosen. I think it’s easier for people to become a couple when they are younger because they share making choices about acquiring household furnishings and goods. In essence, the home they make together is truly a product and a reflection of their relationship together. We older people bring our past with us.
In my current household, even after sharing this space for twenty years, a fairly clear demarcation remains between “yours, mine, and ours”. I’m sure that speaks volumes about us.
May 16, 2015
Gretchen S.
+4
We just drastically downsized from a three bedroom house with far more storage than two people need into a one bedroom apartment with barely any. I’ve been using “spark of joy” as my guide. We have done so much re-evaluation! And will do a second pass. Some of it is archaeology of who we used to be.
Because I am bad at selling but dislike wasting, most of the excess got donated in various ways, including a house-cooling giveaway where we encouraged friends to take things. The more decent clothes went to someone good at selling them.
May 16, 2015
Jonas Neergaard-Nielsen
+1
Looking forward to reading, +M Sinclair Stevens.
Being in Japan had the same effect on me, I think: Previously I would for sure have tried to keep as much of my dinnerware as sets. Now I’m happier having various dishes and cups, some of them with memories attached.
May 16, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+3
+Gretchen S. “Some of it is archaeology of who we used to be.” Oh, yes! That’s the theme of my series. What do the things we keep tell us about who we are and who we aspire to be.
Part of this focus on objects also has to do with the idea of legacy. What do we pass on? I have a single piece of porcelain from my mother’s mother; not valuable but precious as is anything that could survive pioneer life in northern New Mexico. On my father’s side, I thought I had nothing. But recently his baby book was discovered in a his brother’s attic and sent to us by a thoughtful cousin. In it was a clue that allowed me to trace our family back to my father’s first American ancestor Daniel Brainerd, who arrived in Connecticut in 1649 at the age of eight.
In sharp contrast to what I received from my parents, I have a house full of things for which my own offspring has no desire. I look among my nieces and nephews to pass along the family heirlooms and the stories that go with them.
As for more mundane things. I rarely throw anything into the trash. If I can’t find a home for it at Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, or Recycled Reads, I just put it in front of my house with a sign “Free” and someone picks it up.
May 16, 2015
Gita Jaisinghani
+3
Landed here from +Mz Maau’s reshare just to say what a wonderfully written intro that was 🙂
May 16, 2015
Alvin Brinson
+2
I embraced the trash can after I moved about teb years ago and had to rent a full sized uhaul to move everything. I had very little actual furniture either – mist was just boxes of paper and crap. Insoebt about four years throwing things away. The next time I moved I only needed a flatbed trailer, and that was with MORE furniture – because I’d thrown out 95% of the crap I had in boxes.
May 16, 2015
Peter Strempel
+4
+M Sinclair Stevens
An instrumental vision of dealing with belongings strikes me as just too mathematical and robotic. Rational doesn’t always mean mechanistic or reductionist, the way algorithms abstract reality.
As one who has moved more often than some people can number in years alive, I have always been acutely conscious of what I have, and what’s missing.
Books were almost the labour-intensive items to pack, transport and unpack. They are heavy in aggregate, and bulky in the number and size of boxes required.
I prefer moving fridges and large items to dealing with the endless number of book boxes.
But much of that is on the past.
In the 2011 Brisbane flood I lost 95 per cent of my possessions, which were enough to furnish a three bedroom house with all mod cons, plus clothes and completely irreplaceable memorabilia, like childhood photos and chance items of interest (for example, I had a granite rock that may have been an ancient hand axe that I fished out of the Isaar near Munich in the 1970s).
I remember the lost items one by one at different times. I would part with none of them willingly. I have disposed of crap every time I moved. But it was crap. Not an integral part of me or my experiences.
The loss of familiar things is hard to describe. It approaches the loss of friends and relatives after the initial shock and overpowering grief has subsided a little.
There will never be an occasion on which I wouldn’t give all that I won to bring back just some days of more time with lost friends. Nevertheless, lost items are also lost friends. Just not living, breathing ones.
I think I’m with you on choosing things carefully: the things I use most often are deliberated long and hard about functionality and style. Like my coffee cup, which is a mug about the size of a small bucket, and my fountain pens, which are about place and time, and use in different circumstances.
But unlike you I have lost too many people and things not to expect it, and therefore to get progressively hardened to the notion that nothing in my life has been constant, and UI may lose it all when it will hurt the most.
May 16, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+4
I don’t think there is anything mechanistic or algorithmic about Marie Kondo’s methods, at least not from the little I know about them. (I haven’t read her book, yet.) The point of the linked article was merely to say that one reason that she might have struck a popular, and even cross-cultural nerve, is that her philosophy interprets (in a more lyrical way) certain basic principles of behavioral economics.
But to the heart of your comment. I cannot even begin to imagine how devastated, how lost, I would be to lose certain things that are to me irreplaceable despite their minor monetary value. The thought makes my stomach churn and my head dizzy. Even hearing about your loss gives me that strange suspended, disoriented feeling when time and breath stop for a moment. In short, I feel sick thinking about it precisely because I do not see possessions as mere things but as a collections of various moments of our life made physical.
I do look upon objects as friends (especially my books and also my tools, such as pens). More than that, I feel that I put a bit of myself into them, when I considered acquiring them, when I dust or mend them, or just when I hold them in my hand to use…if I’m paying attention. And so when I’m feeling lost, handling familiar objects anchors me again.
This is why I also like old things, things that were owned by other people. I can feel the spirit of all the previous owners. There’s a richness, a patina, to such objects and I also feel like the steward rather than an owner.
I am, perhaps, too attached. I don’t doubt I’ll suffer for it.
May 16, 2015
Gretchen S.
+3
Kondo’s methods, according to the article I read, aren’t mechanistic at all, which is part of the charm. Part of letting go is to thank the things that you are giving away. I can’t count how many things that don’t fit anymore, either physically or metaphorically, or the loved to death shirts, that I couldn’t let go of until I tried that. Or the thing that I “should” keep because it’s in perfect condition…. Because I just never want to wear it. Let someone else get use out of it.
I do get anxious about losing what remains, I say as someone who loves pottery and lives in an earthquake zone…. I mostly buy seconds because we do break things and I feel better if I’m not buying firsts.
The dog was anxious when we moved. We rescued him from a family that had had to move a lot, and he was clearly always in a hurry to leave and go to our old house. Then we put down our rugs and brought in our bed and his and he was suddenly right at home…. And so were we. It was impressive how grounding having familiar things around us was.
May 17, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+3
+Gretchen S. Your dog story sparked an epiphany for me. I am exactly the same way and, because my father was in the US Air Force, I moved every couple of years as a child. But I would do the same thing.I’d have my little collection of cherished possessions. When we’d arrive in new digs, I’d arrange them in their familiar pattern. And then I was home in the new place.
Update
Dec 8, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+3
An update on Maria Kondo from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-origin-story-of-marie-kondos-decluttering-empire
Although I have to agree with author Barry Yourgrau about Kondo’s attitude toward books, especially given that just a couple of weeks ago I read for the first time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which had sat on my shelf for at least 30 years. And last week I read two books on the history of New Mexico, that I’d bought second hand and more or less forgotten until I was cleaning bookshelves.
“A veteran New York design journalist told me that her daughter was a KonMari convert because she felt not reproach but rather an embracing, cheery respect. This conspicuous respect extends to the clutterer, the cluttered premises, and the clutter-objects themselves. It brings a light animism to even your old socks.”
“Kudos, then, to Kondo. Even if her attitude, for instance, toward keeping books—that still-unread means never will be read, and that, once read, books shouldn’t be retained for rereading—strikes me as almost barbaric.”
Like Kyoichi Tsuzuki, I find the following marketing blurb laughable, “After all, as Sunmark notes on its Web site with a touch of cultural pride, living spaces in Japan are tight, so they tend to be tidy and orderly. “In Japan more than anywhere else, tidiness is less a virtue than a philosophy of living,” that New York profile informs us.”
Ha! Ha! Ha! Every Japanese house I’ve ever been in is small and packed to the gills with possessions…maybe not all to the extent that Tsuzuki portrays in his book (mentioned in the article) Tokyo: A Certain Style (a book I also own).
Dec 8, 2015
Peter Strempel
+3
Damn you for jamming up my reading list …!
Dec 8, 2015
Gretchen S.
+1
My rule on books is if they are something I know I want to reread, or loan, or refer to, then I should keep them.
We still haven’t managed to buy shelves for our tiny new place so are reading out of boxes, which is alarming. But we’re rereading something right now (Sweetie started, and then I wanted to), so rereading is definitely a thing.
I do think if I got better at keeping notes and writing reviews that I could replace the “reread maybe someday” shelf with a library, for all but the books I might want to reread instantly.
The Kondo bureau with rolled shirts is working out fine.
Dec 8, 2015
Peter Strempel
+3
+M Sinclair Stevens
BTW, further to your suspicions about my compulsive obsessive tendencies, the image is exactly representative of how I roll up my socks (to prevent de-elasticisation), and also my underwear, belts, shorts, and bandannas.
Dec 8, 2015
M Sinclair Stevens
+3
+Gretchen S. I constantly refer to my books. I’d be lost if I couldn’t look up something or reread a favorite passage. I like dipping into books, too…rather like listening to a familiar song. Every single space we could turn into bookshelves has been turned into bookshelves. And then there are the stacks lying around.
One of my favorite youthful memories was visiting this man who had a separate small house for his books. The bookshelves were in the middle of the room, like stacks in a library, as well as along the walls. Basically, he had an entire house that was a library. I believe that when he died, that he donated the entire collection to the University of Nevada.
Dec 8, 2015
Gretchen S.
+2
+M Sinclair Stevens We had that in our old house, but couldn’t fit the shelves into our apartment! The buyer bought the shelves from us. So we have a lot of boxes in storage at my mom’s, rotated with boxes we keep here. Not ideal but it’s okay. I find that I use the library more, which I like, because I read new things more than reread that way. (I also check things out to reread, though.)
We want to get some real shelves but are stalled on finishing up the kitchen.