I have long been a fan of decluttering. Getting rid of items you haven't used in the past 6 months? Sounds so cleanly logical. Wearing only the clothes that fill you with joy and make you feel wonderful? Just the thought of that makes me feel more attractive. There is something about the promise of decluttering that makes you feel better even BEFORE you have begun the process of decluttering (kind of like committing to starting a diet on Monday makes you feel so much better about yourself on Sunday, even if you never actually start the diet). I was a Marie Kondo aficionado for long before most people knew who she was. What I've come to realise, sadly, is that applying the principles of Marie Kondo during lockdown is a little bit like bringing a knife- no, not even a knife, a wooden spoon perhaps- to a gunfight. It just doesn't cut it. What before I thought was decluttering my life, I have now realised, was was merely fart-arsing around with the fairies of feel-good. This is the real decluttering, Rosie style:
Clothes
Do not ask what fills you with joy when you wear it. That intricately pleated, organic cotton/linen dress that makes you feel like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's... have you tried to iron it? The question you should be asking is: does this item require ironing or can it simply be unpegged from the washing line and folded directly into my cupboard? Bring on the polyester.
Can this item of clothing multi-task i.e. can it be down-cycled from casual-wear to gym-wear to cleaning outfit all in the space of one day? If so, despite the fact that it may make you look like a walrus, it's a keeper.
Another good question is: can my sons and husband walk around in only boxers all day? Yes. The answer is yes, they absolutely can. None of them own dressing gowns, so when it's chillier in the mornings and evenings they drag blankets around with them. This does make us look a little like a wannabe white Basotho family, but blankets are so easy just to fold and pack away during the heat of the day and they are particularly good at hiding dirt (in other words, they seldom need washing). Save the clothes for when you really need them and you will simplify your laundry process dramatically.
Crockery and cutlery
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have not yet tried this out, but it's the direction I am going. One plate, one bowl, one knife, one fork, one spoon, one mug and one glass for each family member. That they wash and pack away into the cupboard themselves after each meal. Maybe one or two serving bowls and a pot and pan. It will be a bit like camping, but in our own house. It seems ridiculously redundant now to have 16 dinner plates, 20 side plates (who needs side plates?), multiple different size bowls, teacups as well as coffee mugs. It also seems like having all those options available simply encourages family members to use a new plate/cup/bowl each time they have something to eat or drink and then leave it in the vicinity of the sink for the magic cleaning fairies to deal with. Most of our country lives with a single set of crockery and cutlery per family member, by default not choice, but I could see why it would be a sensible choice. The SPCA shop will be getting a sizable donation from me once this lockdown is over.
Cushions
What sadist invented cushions? I have realised over the past month that cushions serve absolutely zero functional purpose except perhaps to inflict discomfort and trigger emotional outbursts. And I have them all over my house. I have cushions on my bed, which get taken off the bed before we go to sleep and then have to be replaced every morning when we make up our bed. I will grant that they are very pretty, but I am beginning seriously to doubt that the aesthetic value they add warrants the extra hassle they cause.
The bedroom cushions, however, are almost insignificant in intolerability when compared to the cushions ALL over our lounge. I had no idea that we owned so many cushions. The first thing that anyone in the family does when they sit down on a couch is to remove the cushions around them and throw them onto the floor. They are huge puffy things that look fantastic but would only be practical if you sported an anorexic's bottom. Once on the floor the cushions act as attractive death traps waiting to trip innocent passers by. Perhaps because they are seldom used for their intended purpose, they seem to collect dirt very easily, which then results in the cushions having to be washed. This should be an easy job since they were bought with conveniently zipped covers, but remove a cushion from its cover at your own peril. The foam or feather inner will take on a life of its own once released from its confining cover and you will struggle for hours to squash it back into its shell. Even once you have managed to squeeze the last bit of cushion into cover, the cushion will never regain its former shape and you will be left with oddly lumpy cushions that- it doesn't seem possible, but it is- are even more uncomfortable than they were before. And somehow the grubbiness hasn't even been completely removed. Cushions, be gone!
Ornaments
I am more and more of the opinion that you do not need ornaments in your house. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate beautiful artworks. We have an exquisite replica Pompon polar bear that brings me great joy every time I wipe dust from the perfectly proportioned lines of it's pristine white back. I do not get the same feelings of joy when having to wipe dust off the what-seemed-cheap-but-now-seem-ridiculously-expensive other pieces of crap displayed around our house. Vases, bowls, fake Buddha's, candle holders and other random items that seem to collect dust in all of their crevices now seem ridiculously pointless except as ornate insect traps. And they were in all likelihood made in China, so they are probably embedded with...I don't know...some kind of weird crown-like virus waiting to be exposed to a certain temperature before leaking from the plastic and infecting millions of people world-wide thus causing wide-spread panic and wiping out all economies except China's. I'm kidding (except that it's 3 am so I'm also not entirely joking). The bottom line is that I'm with Marie Kondo on this one. If they are hand-made artworks that bring you joy when you dust them, they deserve to be kept. If not, chuck them.
Stationery
This is probably more of an issue in my life than it should be, because the children are not at school so neither is their stationery. Stationery has an odd characteristic (I'm not sure if its particular to our house or more generalised) of being unable to stay organised no matter how many times I try to reorganise it. In fact, the more I try to sort and categorise the stationery, the more it seems to want to mingle. It's almost as though its defying me. I take the yellow lid off the orange koki and put it back onto the yellow koki and then, when next I look, neither koki even has a lid anymore. I separate different types of stationery into different ice-cream containers: pens and pencils into one, coloured pencils another, coloured pens into a third, erasers and sharpeners and rulers and glue into a fourth. I have a SYSTEM. And yet, I take my eyes off the ice-cream containers for literally a second, and the rubber is in with the coloured pencils. The solution, I have decided, is not to organise more, but to get rid of. Really, why do my children need more than 3 colours for their schoolwork anyway? And who needs a sharp pencil?
Facebook quizzes
I would be really interested to see stats on this. How many more people are playing random and even, at times, bizarre, Facebook quizzes since the start of lockdown? Some are relatively reasonable (I'm talking specifically here about the ones that tell me I'm a genius or an art pundit). Then there are the others. Do I want to know what my ideal job is? I can probably tell you that without a quiz, but I sort of get that. Do I want to know what I would look like in 30 years time? Ok, maybe I get that too. Do I want to know what I'd have looked like 100 years ago? Getting that less. Do I want to know what I would have looked like at my ideal job 100 years ago if I was the opposite gender and lived in the American Mid-West? Not unless I'm really, really, really bored (and perhaps not as much of a genius as the aforementioned tests suggested).
I wonder if we are spending more time doing mindless quizzes and watching dumb YouTube clips because we are looking for an escape (which is a decluttering of sorts). I think that unless you make a conscious effort to limit how much information you expose yourself to, you can get completely bogged down in anxiety-provoking articles and opinion-pieces. And it's not always easy (even for a Facebook-certified genius like me) to differentiate the useful and truthful articles from the inaccurate and sensational ones. Perhaps we should be doing more than a physical decluttering of our homes. Perhaps we should be doing an information decluttering in which we limit how much information (even the true stuff) we are exposed to. Too much information can become like too many ornaments in your mind. I don't think that it helps long-term to replace the information with stupid games or video clips either; I think that what you really need to do to declutter your mind is to unplug consciously and spend time connecting with those around you, with nature and with your God. Perhaps the need I have to declutter my physical home is actually a desire to find peace and calm in my mind. Perhaps once I've decluttered my mind, the mess in my home won't matter as much. Obviously,it could also just be that I have a particularly untidy family and I'm just not the world's greatest cleaner.
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