(Or, How I compromised with Marie Kondo)
I was absolutely taken with Marie Kondo’s seminal book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and subsequently transformed my life into a tidier one. I carefully followed each step in her book, scraping my life clean of knickknacks, dusty books, and tattered seasonal clothing with the contemplative refrain: does it spark joy?
I experienced a rush of excitement each time I opened my dresser drawer revealing carefully-folded t-shirts arranged in a gradient of color. My home office looked like a fortune 500 company. And each morning I would start my day by making coffee in our perfectly-organized kitchen.
But something was missing. It was the junk drawer.
While I had often complained about the junk drawer in the past, I was now mourning the loss of its function. The junk drawer had been a wellspring of creative potential energy, and the contents it once held provided solutions for problems I would now have to pay to solve. If I needed a scrap of emery cloth, a Popsicle stick, a nail, or some 12-gauge pickle wire, I would now have to go to the store and buy it.
Later that month my daughter had a birthday party. We took her group of friends to a local animal farm where I noticed something that gave me pause: All around the farm were various piles of what appeared to be junk.
One grassy area contained rusty oil drums, empty plastic 5-gallon food containers and buckets. A patio was stacked with large boards and smaller fragments of wood. Along side a shed were broken gutters, sheet metal, and scraps of aluminum roofing. A small barn overflowed with a mishmash of electrical conduit, wires, house parts, and broken tools.
It was clear that the junk piles were more than just a stopping point for garbage on its way to a landfill. Instead, they were reservoirs of useful materials. The piles were the farms “junk drawers,” and they were as essential to its operation as any of the tools, animal feed, fuel, or other supplies.
The organized chaos I witnessed at the farm became my new model for de-cluttering. From that day forward it was o.k. to keep enough raw materials around to solve problems, as long as it wasn’t an eyesore, or dangerous to our health. I began to embrace living with clutter — but just the right amount of clutter.
As my junk drawer began to feel comfortably full again, a more important lesson emerged. The greater problem than having clutter, is having the habit that produces clutter: over-shopping.
Over-shopping happens when you keep buying stuff you already have, either impulsively, or because you have lost or misplaced the original stuff.
At this point I decided I would keep most everything I had, but organize it better, and pledge never to replace or re-purchase items I already own. I would become a Master of My Possessions.
To illustrate our over-shopping tendencies to my family, I fixed upon the category of “writing utensil,” and began collecting every pen, pencil, marker, highlighter, and crayon from ever nook and cranny in our house. As each container overflowed, I was forced to find larger and larger containers to hold the shockingly large collection. It became clear that we need never purchase a writing utensil again.
This elucidating exercise led to more search-and-display missions for other dangerous shopping categories: pharmaceuticals, hangers, batteries, light bulbs, picture frames, office supplies, cleaning supplies, school supplies — any of those likely impulse buys we are so prone to.
Now that I’ve been on both sides of the clutter argument, I see that Marie Kondo is mostly right. But de-cluttering isn’t as black and white as I once thought. Perhaps I had to swing completely to her side to realize what kind of clutter I needed to let back into my life.
In the end, there are two kinds of clutter:
A) Good clutter — it acts as a buffer between you and your impulse buys. It’s a reservoir of raw materials for creativity and problem solving, just like on the farm. It’s good for the earth. It’s recycling.
B) Bad clutter — it slows you down and impedes your creativity. It’s disturbing. It’s an eyesore. It’s costly. It may even be hazardous to your health. Bad clutter keeps growing through careless purchases.
For me, to be absolutely clutter free would be an environmental and financial catastrophe. I need a few piles of junk to dig through when I’m jury-rigging a fix for the broken refrigerator door, or making a quick homemade birthday card for my Mom.
This is the good kind of clutter, and it’s staying in my life.
Desk Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Photo of art supplies by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay