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| Emptying one drawer gives us a small, manageable amount. |
Swedish Death Cleaning has been in the social media a lot lately. Despite its gruesome name, it is a positive concept. Any adult in my generation has probably faced the depressing task of cleaning out a house where the resident kept everything for decades. It's horrible and sometimes even tragic. In the cases where the person clearly couldn't cope and had just given up, it's heartbreaking. I faced this myself and I'll never forget the air of darkness in that house. The sorrow clung to every surface, it was in the very air one breathed, along with the black mould.
It terrifies me to think that I could die and inflict this on my son. I discovered Flylady myself while he was still a boy, so he's grown up with the concept of fighting clutter, and he lives in a really rational way. It would be just awful to think I'd stick him with what I had to go through. So I've been toying with the Big Declutter for many years. Flylady, Marie Kondo, Swedish Death Cleaning and so many others. I've read the books, I've tried the methods, and although I've achieved quite a lot, I still have far too much STUFF and I still feel burdened by it. Not in a life-ruined, sad-every-day kind of way, but I recently spent ten days on holiday in Brisbane, and I had a little apartment there, and the clean, spare, whiteness of it was just balm to my soul. I spent quite a lot of time in that apartment, as walking was very painful due to an injury from which I was recovering, and every moment was joyful. The emptiness of it. Not once did I miss anything except my dog and my husband.
Be that as it may, the full-on, blitzkreig approach, where you eliminate everything not absolutely essential one category at a time, as in the Kondo method, isn't for me. It's just too full-on. I resent it, if that makes sense. Of all the methods I've read about, the Flylady one comes closest to the ideal. Even there, though, I fail to adopt her system whole-heartedly. All those routines and checklists always end up pissing me off and I get overwhelmed, and it's almost a kind of mental clutter, and if there's one thing this little black duck can't cope with, it's being overwhelmed and feeling out of control. So I didn't succeed with Flylady either.
Nevertheless, Flylady's basic principles do work for me. Hey, it got me through Law School! I was failing Criminal Law when Robert Cilley gave me the study technique, and that got me through the whole degree with credits and distinctions. I even made the Dean's List once! So the principles are really good, but the way they are implemented in the standard Flylady method, although it's a great method, just isn't for me.
The central concept is for me though, and that is the notion that decluttering is a lifestyle choice rather than a one-off activity. So I have the idea that I'll go back to my old ways with the housework, but build the decluttering into everything I do. It will be easy enough to tell if it's working or not, because if and only if it is working, boxes of stuff will be going out to the Op Shop. Or big items being given to people in the community or whatever. Actually I love doing that; I've given away many super things directly to the recipients I've found in our local community's facebook group, and it always makes me feel so RICH. I even ticked a bucket list item doing this, giving an old caravan to a homeless family. They are still living in it and I get such a warm feeling every time I think of that.
So, my idea is that as I go about my regular housework, I'll be always looking for things that can go out. Watch this space for how well it works!
