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July 2015

Post image for Out of Sight is Not Out of Mind

For a brief time in 2011, I had a place for everything. I discarded more than half of my possessions, with the idea of owning nothing that didn’t have its own hook, spot or shelf. Once everything had a home, I could put everything away in five minutes, and wake up to a clear space and a clear mind.

It took about a month to do — and about six months to undo. When I wrote about my success, I gave it the ambitious title “Everything in its Place, Finally and Forever.” Things eventually reverted to tolerable clutter. It never got back to a clothes-on-the-floor level of messy, but there are objects on the dining room table that are never used for dining, and books living on surfaces other than my bookshelves.

I have never forgotten the uncanny peace that comes from a home devoid of chaos. It’s a completely different home-life experience, free of a certain kind of tension that you only notice when it’s gone. Every item sitting out is an unresolved issue, both in the real world and in the mind. They give your day-to-day life a sense of perpetual unresolvedness, like you’re always in the middle of renovating or switching to new software at work.

I’ve been meaning to do it again for four years now, but it’s an enormous job, and the benefits seem to wear off too quickly. Unless you’re born organized, decluttering is a fight against gravity and entropy, and maybe some other inalienable laws of the cosmos.

The problem was my method. I thought tidying was just a matter of making things look nicer. While I was going closet-to-closet, purging and re-stacking, a tiny Japanese woman was developing a science around the idea of “everything in its place”. Now she’s got a million-selling book and a three-month waiting list for her services.

Her name is Marie Kondo, and she says our conventional notions of tidying set us up for relapse. When we’re children we’re told to tidy our rooms, which we know means “get everything off the floor and out of sight”, and we generally don’t develop the concept of “tidy” any more deeply than that.

Marie says tidying up is something that should done in one single, thorough effort, and it should last a lifetime, because it’s as much a rearrangement your philosophy as of your home. Our homes — and consequently, our lives — get messy because we have fearful and unhealthy relationships with our possessions. Where you keep your things is important, but it’s less important than which things you keep, how you feel about them, and why you have kept them.  Read More

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