Kondo the condo (Week 24)
"Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony."
Please excuse me if I follow in the footsteps of the realdonaldtrump and quote Albert Einstein. Truth is, everyone could stand to heed Einstein's words about simplifying your life. It was one of the cardinal rules that allowed him to free his brain for more weighty matters. Maybe we could express it this way: einstein = minimizing clutter². For me, this week was about reducing clutter and simplifying the Marie Kondo way. The key to the technique is a simple 3-letter word: joy.
There's a lot of good stuff coming out of Japan these days (maybe you saw my recent post on forest bathing). Well, another hot one is Marie Kondo, star of the wildly popular Netflix Show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. I'll spare you a few hundred hours of reality show viewing and boil it down to a sentence. Walk around your home room by room, pick up items one at a time and ask yourself if they give you joy. Yup, it's that easy. No joy, and out they go.
But what's so bad about clutter, anyway? Some people swear by the benefits of keeping a messy desk, or think others are just way too uptight if their homes are overly tidy. Fine and dandy, but this ain't about that. In a study published in Psychology Today, researchers determined that freeing yourself of clutter can actually lead to greater happiness. Well, I'm always willing to give that a go. And so I did.
The issue for Val and me is that we already went through a very similar exercise less than a year ago, when we moved from a 2800 square foot bungalow in Calgary to a 900 square foot condo in Victoria. So we had already parted with about half of our worldly goods. But in most cases, we were evaluating each item based on practical questions: will we ever use it again, or do we have room for it?
Re-phrasing the question based on joy is really quite revealing. I walked around our little condo picking up things one by one, feeling its shape and weight and closing my eyes to envision what this item meant in my life. In most cases, I realized we had done a great job by keeping the things that mattered most to us. But there were still a few outliers.
One was medals. Every marathon, 10k fun run, triathlon and bike race I had ever entered insisted on draping my neck with an achievement medal. At the time, I had swelled with pride like an 8-year-old in need of gratification. Then I plopped the medal on a hook so that it jangled against its mates anytime anyone brushed past it. Well, those medals no longer bring me joy. I have the memories. I have the pictures. The medals, more than 30 of them, are history.
Now, on to books. I've always asked myself why I keep so many books. After reading them, the likelihood of re-reading them is about 10 percent. I might loan the book to a friend, but for the most part they just stand on a shelf next to their compatriots like rows of soldiers mutely waiting on their marching orders. So I decided that there are some that simply give me joy every time I look at them (the vast minority) and the others, well, meh. So I marched them off to the Little Free Library.
Then there was the unworn Cold Garden ball cap. Besides the fact I was never likely to wear it (a practical evaluation) I realized that it had never given me joy. It was simply a keepsake that had been bought by my friends in Calgary at a brewpub during my last week there. It definitely had emotional appeal because they are excellent people and getting rid of it seemed like bad friendship karma. But back to the question: did it bring me joy? It did not. You can guess the rest.
The happiness meter has swung to the right. Thanks Marie Kondo!
NEXT WEEK: I'm going on a 3-week bicycle trek from Victoria to San Francisco with my son Nic. I'll be posting a month's worth of Goodness52 when we get back! For the blog record, I'll be:
• Spending every day, 24/7, with my son
• Covering 1,000 miles by cycling every day
• Sleeping outside for 7 straight nights
• Learning to tie knots
Please excuse me if I follow in the footsteps of the realdonaldtrump and quote Albert Einstein. Truth is, everyone could stand to heed Einstein's words about simplifying your life. It was one of the cardinal rules that allowed him to free his brain for more weighty matters. Maybe we could express it this way: einstein = minimizing clutter². For me, this week was about reducing clutter and simplifying the Marie Kondo way. The key to the technique is a simple 3-letter word: joy.
There's a lot of good stuff coming out of Japan these days (maybe you saw my recent post on forest bathing). Well, another hot one is Marie Kondo, star of the wildly popular Netflix Show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. I'll spare you a few hundred hours of reality show viewing and boil it down to a sentence. Walk around your home room by room, pick up items one at a time and ask yourself if they give you joy. Yup, it's that easy. No joy, and out they go.
But what's so bad about clutter, anyway? Some people swear by the benefits of keeping a messy desk, or think others are just way too uptight if their homes are overly tidy. Fine and dandy, but this ain't about that. In a study published in Psychology Today, researchers determined that freeing yourself of clutter can actually lead to greater happiness. Well, I'm always willing to give that a go. And so I did.
The issue for Val and me is that we already went through a very similar exercise less than a year ago, when we moved from a 2800 square foot bungalow in Calgary to a 900 square foot condo in Victoria. So we had already parted with about half of our worldly goods. But in most cases, we were evaluating each item based on practical questions: will we ever use it again, or do we have room for it?
Re-phrasing the question based on joy is really quite revealing. I walked around our little condo picking up things one by one, feeling its shape and weight and closing my eyes to envision what this item meant in my life. In most cases, I realized we had done a great job by keeping the things that mattered most to us. But there were still a few outliers.
One was medals. Every marathon, 10k fun run, triathlon and bike race I had ever entered insisted on draping my neck with an achievement medal. At the time, I had swelled with pride like an 8-year-old in need of gratification. Then I plopped the medal on a hook so that it jangled against its mates anytime anyone brushed past it. Well, those medals no longer bring me joy. I have the memories. I have the pictures. The medals, more than 30 of them, are history.
Now, on to books. I've always asked myself why I keep so many books. After reading them, the likelihood of re-reading them is about 10 percent. I might loan the book to a friend, but for the most part they just stand on a shelf next to their compatriots like rows of soldiers mutely waiting on their marching orders. So I decided that there are some that simply give me joy every time I look at them (the vast minority) and the others, well, meh. So I marched them off to the Little Free Library.
The happiness meter has swung to the right. Thanks Marie Kondo!
NEXT WEEK: I'm going on a 3-week bicycle trek from Victoria to San Francisco with my son Nic. I'll be posting a month's worth of Goodness52 when we get back! For the blog record, I'll be:
• Spending every day, 24/7, with my son
• Covering 1,000 miles by cycling every day
• Sleeping outside for 7 straight nights
• Learning to tie knots
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