Last week, I shared with you we are finally tackling our home remodeling project. With newfound excitement, Orlando and I whipped out the calendar and started coordinating.
The plan was to work backward and pace ourselves to avoid overwhelm: If demolition starts on this day, then we have to move out on this day, which means we have to do this and this and this on these days.
Shortly thereafter, the decluttering and packing process began. I started with kitchen appliances and other items, such as platters, vases, candleholders and decorative items. I had once read Marie Kondo’s: The Magic Of Tidying Up and I vaguely remembered when decluttering how important it is to gather items by categories, not rooms so you could see how much you really have of something before you decide to keep it or discard it.
Becoming Minimalist
“You talk a big game, Caro” my husband lay the flattened boxes in the center of the garage. “Let’s see just how “minimalist” you really are. This is your super bowl!”
The minimalist movement has always fascinated me. Not so much the idea of stripping down your belongings to 100 items or fewer kind of movement, but more the “rational minimalism” philosophy. In his book, Simplify, Joshua Becker notes that upon entering his home, you may never know that minimalists live there, and yet everything in their home serves a purpose or is something they love.
Joshua Becker defines minimalism as “the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it.”
Although I’ve been slowly adopting that philosophy for a long time, I often get stuck in the weeds. I keep things because of sentimental value or because I may need them someday. Oh, and I’m always hanging on to bags of things waiting to give them to the right person. Rather than decluttering, I just move stuff to their eternal holding places — the garage or the trunk of my minivan.
This drives my husband crazy. He is gifted with a ruthless detachment to material things. In the past, he has placed deadlines for me to find the perfect person who needs my donations before it disappears from our home. “You’ve got until Friday at 10am. Then don’t ask me where it went,” he’ll warn.
So here we are sharing a common goal — only keep what we’ll love or need in our new home and get rid of the rest — although Orlando is better equipped to make that happen.
Back to Basics
Whenever I begin a new project or have a new goal, the first thing I do is work on my mindset about it. I love to read books and listen to podcasts on the things I’m focused on at that moment. The experts keep me motivated and tunnel-visioned in accomplishing my goals.
I browsed through Marie Kondo’s Tidying book and Becker’s Simplify again as my way of getting back to the basics. I also started listening to Kondo’s new audiobook, Spark Joy, on my library app to clarify on some questions I had from her first book.
The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t following Marie’s order of categories to tidy which is:
- Clothing.
- Books.
- Papers.
- Komono (Miscellaneous items): This category includes everything else that is not clothing, books, or papers, such as kitchen utensils, electronic devices, toys, and even small furniture pieces.
- Sentimental items.
I had begun with the Komono, but quickly switched over to tackle my clothes instead. I wanted to follow Kondo’s method as precisely as possible to set myself up for success. Kondo claims that “Once you have experienced what it’s like to have a truly ordered house, you’ll feel your whole world brighten. Never again will you revert to clutter.”
When the student is ready
In re-reading this material, I quickly realized how much I’d missed the first time. There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. The first time I came across this information, it was enough to spark tweaks and adjustments to my lifestyle — but I wasn’t ready to fully absorb the information.
That’s why it’s so important to always plant seeds in people’s minds. The seeds take time to take root and sprout. They need to be watered, nurtured, but also left alone to bloom in their own timing.
What to Keep
One thing I didn’t grasp the first time was that Marie’s criteria isn’t focused on what to get rid of. According to her, discarding alone does not bring joy to your life. The focus is on what you want to keep. Those may seem like the same, but the difference was huge to me.
I’d always thought that the only way to declutter and be minimalist was to get rid of a lot of stuff.
That left me wondering how much was too much. How many pj’s should I own? What about jeans or shoes? What if I have a few items of a similar category that I love? Do I have to choose between them because I don’t need that many? Should I keep only what fits in the box I had for the items?
What if I eliminated too much? Would that give me permission to fill the empty spaces with newer things? (I think this last question is the one that makes “decluttering” a never-ending ordeal. Getting rid of some things gives us permission to accumulate new things until it’s time to declutter again.)
But now I understand that the goal is simply to create a living environment filled with things you love.
I could keep whatever I wanted to keep — but if I kept it — it better be for good reason.
Define Joy
If you mention the Marie Kondo method to almost anyone, their likely response is, “Oh, that’s the joy lady who kisses and thanks her stuff as she gets rid of it.”
She has become quite popular for her unconventional approach to materialistic things. According to the Japanese tidying guru, keeping only the things that spark joy at least once in your life is an important step towards creating a more joyful and fulfilling life.
I wanted nothing more than to use her joy standard. But as I sat in a mound of clothes, I did not know what sparked joy.
I’d hold a garment in my hand and would feel nothing. I couldn’t even tell if I liked it, much less if it sparked joy.
I caught myself wanting to take pictures of my outfits, send to my friends, and ask them if I should keep those items or not. I justified my indecision with the excuse that “I’m not fashionable.”
But the more I sat there and wrestled with my clothes, the more I observed things about myself. For example, since I’m not a huge shopper, most of my clothes are gifts either from my mom or other people.
I often wear things because they’ve been given to me, not because I love them. As I sorted, I was drawn to some pieces more than others — and most of those were ones I had bought! But I was so used to deferring my choices to what other people like that I had stopped trusting myself.
During our vision board workshops, we have our guests do a joy audit worksheet. For some, this is an easy exercise. But many have lost touch with the activities, events, and or things that bring them joy — usually because they spend all of their time either working or taking care of other people. The joy audit encourages people to pay close attention from that moment on to what brings them joy.
It’s time for me to do this as well with the things I own. What started as a goal to minimize packing has become an opportunity to go deeper. It’s time to pay attention and be more mindful. This is my chance to get to know myself better and step into a more confident, decisive version of myself — one that can easily define what sparks joy.
This may just be my super bowl after all.
What about you? Are you creating a life that sparks joy? Do you know how to define that? Let me know in the comments!
