Minimalist Living: Decluttering for Joy, Health, and Creativity (7 page)

Here are some more questions to keep in mind to guide you in your editing process. You don’t have to ask these questions about every item, but having them in the back of your mind will help:

• How did I acquire this item?
  
• Am I afraid of forgetting something or someone if I get rid of this thing?
  
• Is there any guilt associated with getting rid of this item? Why?
  
• Am I afraid of hurting someone’s feelings if I get rid of this?
  
• If this item were broken or was stolen, would I feel a bit relieved?
  

Gifts

Disposing of gifts that we no longer like – or never liked, for that matter – is a notoriously tricky topic. What if the giver should ask about the gift? Is there a time allowance for how long something should be kept before it’s acceptable to let it enhance someone else’s life?

When you receive a gift – whether you like it or think it’s hideous – you of course acknowledge the giver and express your gratitude. It really is the thought, not the gift, that counts. The relationship with the giver is what is important. Most people won’t ask or follow up about gifts – and that is wise.

I once gave a gift and made the mistake of asking
about it later. The gift was something that I really liked, and I had almost kept it for myself after I bought it. After giving it to my friend, I realized she never used it. So I asked her if she liked it, and if she didn’t, could I borrow it once in a while or take it off her hands completely. I should have simply never mentioned it again. My questions led to an awkward exchange because she was far too polite to admit that she didn’t like it, or whatever the case was. What I learned is that most people are too polite to admit any reservations whatsoever about a gift. I have certainly white lied about how I feel about a gift. So, in case you have a friend who makes the same mistake I did and inquires later about a gift, simply know how you're going to respond. Never keep something just in case someone asks about a gift or to preserve someone’s feelings. Instead, choose your strategy: complete honesty; a big fat white lie; or, preferably, the truth blunted with kindness. Most people understand that it’s not possible to keep every item ever given to them.

Another measure you can take to insure yourself against follow-up questions about the gift is to wear, use, or display your gift at least once. Take a photo and email it to the giver, or hand write a note of gratitude. In addition to providing insurance against
nosy follow-up questions, written acknowledgment is simply classy behavior. Once you express gratitude, then do as your heart desires with the gift, whether it be treasuring it forever or taking it to a charity.

Editing

Throughout this process, remember the value that editing can have for you. As
with everything in life, there’s as much art to what is left out as to what is put in. Don’t underestimate how much energy and attention each thing you own takes from your life on a daily basis. For example, remember Carl Richards from Chapter Two? He’s someone who would (and did, presumably) benefit from getting rid of the shirts that no longer fit him. To take it one step further, he could minimize his wardrobe even more, wearing a “uniform” of his choice every day. No one will care about his repeat outfits, and if they do, they are probably the sort of unpleasant people he wouldn’t want to be around anyway. Plus he’ll be too busy to worry about them; he’ll be pursuing his actual interests and goals with the time and mental energy he’s saving himself each morning. My parents have a friend who, after they complimented him on his appearance, told them that one day he’d simply decided to wear only what he felt handsome, sharp, and great in. If he put something on and it didn’t fit the bill, he got rid of it.

On the flipside of this example, someone who has a passion for fashion or who takes great joy in dressing with variety each morning should keep his or her big closet and abundant choices.

Consider applying this concept of editing your choices in any area that you don’t think much about, don’t have a passion in, or would like to behave differently in. Here are some areas to get you started thinking about editing:

• Fashion
  
• Self-education (books, etc)
  
• Entertainment (movies, books, television, video games, music)
  
• Food
  
• Health
  
• Relaxation
  
• Personal g
  rooming
  
• Outdoor furniture and accessories
  
• Fitness equipment
  

Editing for better habits and easier goal-fulfillment is one of the central tenets of this book. Make it easier on yourself to do what you love and to go after your desires. Put the tools and accessories for your favorite pastimes front and center. Make them the sacred heart of your home. Equally as important, get rid of stuff that distracts or that will sabotage your goals and dreams. Distractions include anything that you have only because it’s conventional, because in the past you enjoyed it, or because you feel guilty about it – not because you currently use and enjoy it. Saboteurs include things that tempt you away from your goals, for example, junk food when you're watching your weight, or a television when you're trying to fill your free time with a more meaningful activity. Junk food, televisions, and other common saboteurs are all widely available in other people’s homes, and well, just about everywhere. Should you miss them, they’re easily found.

Area-Specific Advice

The process discussed here is effective for every area of the home, garage, and outdoor space. I’ll add a few notes about specific spaces.

Closets

The usual advice
, “If you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it,” is sound. I’d also suggest severely editing your closet down to a basic “uniform” if you don’t enjoy thinking about fashion. A suggested uniform-like wardrobe is five shirts and three pairs of slacks for men, and 4 shirts, a dress, two pairs of slacks, and a skirt for women. Three pairs of shoes are usually sufficient for anyone, or perhaps four if you live in a snowy climate. Customize your wardrobe to your needs.

Garages, Attics, and Basements

These areas usually collect extra dust and clutter because they are out of sight from where most day-to-day living happens. Don’t let yourself off the hook on these areas. Use extra care to protect your nose and eyes from dust.

Storage Units

Graham Hill notes that Americans have three times the amount of storage space in their homes and on their property today than they did fifty years ago. Yet despite the increased amount of storage, the personal storage industry is a 22 billion dollar, 2.2 billion square foot industry, reports Hill.
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If you have things in a mini-storage unit, or several, ask yourself some hard questions about why it’s there and how long it’s been there. When are you going to use or get rid of the stuff? How much money have you spent on storage? What was your plan when you put things in storage and have you stuck to your plan? If not, how can you follow through now? People with things in storage tend to leave them there for much longer than they intended and therefore spend more money than they were planning to. Monthly mini-storage rates in a big city can be more than utilities and a gym membership combined. Think hard before you ever put anything into storage. As Robert Frost wrote in his famous poem “The Road Not Taken,”

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

We make choices and move forward, rarely going back in life. Way leads on to way, and we don’t always go back to our mini-storage units at all.

Just in case you aren’t fully convinced about the downsides of putting your stuff in storage, I’ll include the following portion of a Letter to the Editor written by an anonymous contributor. He’s given me permission to reprint what he wrote after finding out that a mini-storage facility might be built near his San Francisco neighborhood:

Despair echoes loudest in the dark hallways of mini-storage facilities.
Almost every doorway opens into a sad story, each more tragic than the last.
The sadness hangs so heavily in the air that it creates a force as toxic as black mold. 
It is where broken and incomplete people store pieces of their broken and
incomplete lives.
For many it is their address. Instead of an apartment or a dream home they once had, now a storage unit is all they can afford due to foreclosure.
These are the ones waiting at the gate when the mini-storage
opens in the morning and the last to leave when it closes in the evening.
The key to their padlock is the only key they carry. The mini-storage
restroom becomes their bathroom, kitchen, and laundry. When they do leave, many of them head to a shelter, a vehicle, a tent, or a cardboard box tucked in doorway of an alley a few blocks away.
These marginal citizens often scavenge the things that consumers cast off.
The treasures they cull from the trash end-up on blankets in
sidewalk sales or in flea markets. The proceeds of these sales pay the cost
of their mini-storage rent. These are the people society cast off.
For others, the victims of job layoffs, evictions, divorces, illness, and
death, it is where the remnants of former lives reside, reminders of their
happier pasts, literally on cold storage for now. Some units contain a
deceased loved one's clothing and personal effects that heirs couldn't bear to throw away-tucked into a rented cubbyhole, overflowing with deferred grief.
These places are for people who are committed to not making a commitment.
They can't use it and they can't throw it away. They can't stay in a place
and they won't move away. They can't get on with their lives. They try to
maintain a past that doesn't exist anymore. They think paying rent to keep
unneeded items makes them more valuable.
The elderly on fixed incomes pay rent on memories with the hope they won't lose them. Instead of paying to hold on to pieces of their past they could be enjoying the present.
Souls tormented by the burden of their possessions roam the halls eerily
like ghosts. Many are ghosts of their former selves. Drug addicts,
prostitutes, and the mentally ill seek asylum in their month-to-month refuge from their hand-to-mouth existence. Thieves and
prostitutes use their storage units to hide the loot they steal or take in trade.
The proliferation of mini-storage units in a town is usually a sign of its
decay. It tells of mass exodus, evictions, addiction, tragedy, madness,
sickness, crime, incarceration, and death. It is a business that supports and exploits the downward mobility of humanity. It is a drain on a community that flushes directly to the bowels of Hell.

If you were wondering, yes, the community kept the mini-storage unit out of the area.

Sort Later

As you go through your
items, asking about the pleasure, use, and meaning each thing provides to your life, you’ll be tempted to wonder what you're going to do with all the stuff you're getting rid of. Don’t worry about that until the end of the room or section that you're working on. Instead, gather all the unneeded things – the stuff that doesn’t serve you anymore – into a large box, bag, or designated space. This transitional box is a place where things can sit for a day or two during your editing process. Next, we’ll talk about exactly what to do with all that extra stuff that is no longer serving you.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Creating a Fresh New Space

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

Once you’ve treated a room to editing via the gazing or blazing process, you should have filled your transitional box or area. Perhaps you’ve even filled several bags or an entire room. The essential belongings that remain in the room are probably either scattered about on the floor or on whatever surface is available.

We can now turn our attention either to disposing of the items in the transitional box, or putting the room we’ve edited back into order. Let’s put our attention on the room, first, since with a beautiful, clean, open room, we’re more likely to stick to our intention of finding other homes for everything that we edited out.

Speaking of clean, now is a great time to scrub your freshly simplified space or have it professionally cleaned. Whether you clean it yourself or have a professional do it, make sure to use products free from indoor contaminants like volatile organic compou
nds (VOCs), especially if you have respiratory issues. Certain kinds of cleaning products can cause risks to your health. A study from the October 2007 issue of the
American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine
identified 3,503 people who were asthma free at the beginning of the study. The results showed that 42% of the people who used cleaning sprays such as glass cleaners, furniture cleaners, and air fresheners over the course of the study experienced asthma symptoms. VOCs in common household cleaning products have been associated with asthma and implicated as carcinogens, reproductive toxins, hormone disruptors, and neurotoxins. To get you started on healthy cleaning, throw out any ammonia you have – or products that contain it. Ammonia is a nose, throat, and respiratory irritant. It can cause wheezing and shortness of breath; prolonged exposure can cause bronchitis.

Consider using the Environmental Working Group’s guide to healthy cleaning to find out which products are safer. Don’t trust labels on products at the store. Words like “green” or “natural” can be misleading because there are no standards that products must meet to put those words on a label. You can clean most surfaces in your home with soap, water, baking soda, and white vinegar, adding a few drops of your favorite essential oil for fragrance.
Bonus points if you get rid of all the bottles of harsh and unhealthy chemical cleaners during your decluttering sessions.

Once you’ve cleaned and prepared your surfaces to hold your carefully selected remaining belongings, it’s time to find a place for everything. You might find that your new Minimalist Mission Statement inspires you to move things around a little bit. Do so according to your vision for your home. In fact, this part is where the Minimalist Mission Statement is your best friend, so make sure to keep it handy.

Anything you have because it’s beautiful or inspires joy should be displayed proudly, with good light and plenty of breathing room around it. The exception to this rule is collections of similar items, which often look better grouped together. Try to avoid curio cabinets unless they are lit from within and frequently cleaned. Otherwise, things tend to get lost in the dimness and dust of the interiors.

Everything else should be stored according to frequency of use. Store items based on how often you use them:

• Daily
  
• Weekly or Monthly
  
• Once or twice a year
  

Things you touch daily should be stored at eye or hand level, preferably out in the open. You should be able to access them almost effortlessly; doing so should not require leaning down or getting a stepping stool. Shelves, baskets, and countertops are ideal places to keep these items. Closets, cabinets, and drawers are less ideal, unless they are very easy to access.

Weekly or monthly-use items should also be stored in easy to access spots, but they can be out of sight, as long as they don’t require using a stepping stool to access or moving other things to get to them.

Things you only use a couple
of times a year or less can be stored in the least convenient storage places in your home, such as the attic or basement, under beds, or in high cabinets and shelves.

Think about it like this: daily use items should take zero “steps” to access. Opening drawers and cabinets and boxes each counts as a step. Ideally, weekly or monthly access items take only one step to access. And things you use really infrequently can take two or more steps to access (i.e., pulling down the ladder to go to the attic or crouching down and pulling a box out from under the bed.)

Finding a place for everything is vital, since even if you have only a few things, the place can still appear cluttered if things aren’t pleasingly stashed. Yet perfection isn’t the goal here, so don't stress about storing things. As you live in your new, minimalist space, you’ll find yourself fine-tuning the locations of your stuff to better fit your life.

As a final step, once you’ve found space for everything in the area you’ve been decluttering, move all the things that don’t go in that room or space to the place that they’ll go in according to your Minimalist Mission Statement. If you’ve already edited that room, find spots for the additional items now. If you haven’t, just place the new items in the room and find spots for them once your schedule takes you to that area. Step back. Smile. You’ve just completed one area of your new minimalist home. Congratulations.

Perseverance

I emphasize creating a fresh, welcoming space before I cover what to do with all the items you’ve just decluttered for an important reason: this is hard work. Simplifying your life can be exhausting, emotional, and dusty. You’ve got to see your accomplishments, room-by-room, along the way or you might forget why you're doing this project. The rewards of more life — more joy, better health, and more creativity — can start coming to you right now, as soon as you get started.

In addition to creating your ideal spaces one room at a time, there are a couple other strategies you can employ to make sure you persevere and finish decluttering your home. The first is accountability. The more people you tell about your desires for simplicity, the better. You may want to consider going public on Facebook or Twitter so people can support you.
Post something like “Just read
Minimalist Living
, by the brilliant and genius Genevieve Parker Hill and I’m inspired! I’m going to declutter my home and simplify my life by ______ (insert date).” You can, of course, adjust “brilliant and genius” to whichever adjectives you prefer. The point it, the more specific you can be with what you're doing, why you're doing it, and when you're going to be finished, the more effective this technique is. Going public generally makes us more likely to uphold our commitments to ourselves, because we want to be seen as holding true to our word and having integrity. If you're the only one who knows your commitment, it’s too easy to let yourself off the hook.

If you’d like to share your intentions with a community of likeminded people (and me!) you can post your decluttering plans to our community of minimalist living enthusiasts on Facebook. Go to
www.facebook.com/mnmlstlvng

Finally, keep your motivation to persevere in creating fresh new spaces in your home and life strong by proper pacing. Only you can decide what your schedule allows for. Only you can make the time you need to simplify your life. Make sure you allow yourself a generous amount of time so that this project can be fun. For some people, a challenge is motivating. For example, “I will declutter my home by the holidays!” creates a sense of excitement and vision. Others will have more fun with it if they relax and give themselves an easy-to-reach deadline. Try dividing your home up into rooms or smaller areas of your home and setting up a schedule. Just make sure that you do a little bit every day, or you may lose momentum.

Next, let’s consider the pile of stuff that is waiting for you to deal with it so that it can bring joy to someone else’s life.