Chapter Text
An activity that has to be done at some point. It is not cleaning. It is ordering your possessions or whatever objects are in your vicinity. For the sake of narrowing down on the topic, I’ll stick to the tidying done at home, or wherever is generally considered home. Also to smaller items, furniture not included. Not at work either, which would be another aspect of it, adding more layers.
Being done with the first definitions, let me go on to define some more, followed by a bit of the past, the time I consider the ‘breakthrough’ and whatever is now, which is refining and putting theory into practice.
Tidying should not be considered a chore.
The thing is, growing up, you were probably told by your parents or someone to clean, tidy up, or do any other activity that would give the chaos around you order. Combine this with rules or other limiting circumstances, such as ‘no playstation before you clean up’ or some such and you have the impression stuck in your head that cleaning or tidying is a generally unpleasant, unwanted activity. Since in general there are no ‘golden rules’ passed down by previous generations or ‘rule of thumb’ that can be followed or taught, the results may have led to you having to repeat the process of tidying or cleaning. Basically, how you did it is wrong and did not match what the parent expected. Io and behold – explain nothing, get bad results. What a surprise!
So instead, the chaos, the mess, or the painful experience of stepping onto something sharp become every day life. Thus, the chaos becomes the everyday occurrence, the normal sight, the normal view, the norm. The status quo. It even spreads like a plague. I don’t clean if you don’t… etcetera.
All the things you own are just around you, somewhere, but they are there. Sometimes you even know where that one thing is that you are looking for. The chaotic one is an energetic environment. A mess leads you to search for something, get sidetracked, then forget what you were looking for, maybe remember the next day. Just like such an exercise of search and find - some of the items you have may not even be worth keeping.
The process above may or may not energise you. There is a good chance you find something that helps you remember an event you fondly think back on. And this gives you a boost to do whatever is now. There’s also a chance that you spend five hours looking for something you did not need after all and just call it a day.
But is that really the way it should be? At least that’s what I was thinking for a long time. While I was never the tidiest child, I also never left my room looking like a bomb had exploded. Food on a plate left to rot on the desk? Nah. Clothes on the ground in a pile? Sure. Notebooks, pencils or whatever else school related all over the desk – yessir. Later on, having a huge mess of cables all over the desk making me feel like Lain from Serial Experiments Lain – right this way, you are now connected to the Wired. Talk about immersive.
But the little urge to be just a bit more tidy so I can get rid of the dust and dirt around me was always there. Even more so if I thought about small bugs just hiding between all those toys or other belongings.
So, in a bit of a first effort: tissue boxes were converted nonstop by me to be a makeshift box for small items. I also shifted around items from one place to the other while looking for what seemed the best spot – these plastic bricks sure look like they would be painful to step on, so let’s get them elsewhere.
These papers are in the way. This book on the ground would look better on that shelf. This space on the shelves is not used efficiently enough – there’s air pockets while bigger books are elsewhere. You’re telling me these furniture pieces are adjustable?
But the Breakthrough of the small urge in the back of my mind, plus the end of the unending shifting of items back and forth, came only two or three years ago. At some point your possessions, possess you or something like that. But either way, it was getting hard to maintain all the stuff I had collected or gathered up in a small room or whatever space I was designated. Here a gentle note that cost of housing makes living in small spaces necessary for the time being. I leave what small space it is to the reader’s imagination: storage unit, a single room of a flat, a room of a family house, a van.
So, with limited space in mind, there was something that had to be done. And I’ll get into the details soon. So, the urge grew strong enough, mostly thanks to a certain pandemic that made my space feel uncomfortable after having to self-isolate twice. Small changes were made all the time, but it did not work in the end as the feeling of cramped, or overburdened came back.
I needed a plan, or a system to make it better. There’s a lot of them popping up all over, but I only needed one. Why I decided to pick the book about the KonMari method is honestly a mystery to me still. But the videos about the folding of clothes got me hooked. It was fresh, it looked good, it fit even with more clothes. In other words, it looked scalable. There were principles and thought behind it. It also looked simple enough to mimic (thought from earlier about not having rules on tidying passed down). I won’t share the exact details on the five steps or categories the method has, except you sort by clothes-books-paper-misc. items-sentimental. Above this, the item has to ‘spark joy’ or be useful.
While there is room for criticism for the method, or what became of the brand, we’ll leave that aside here. I read the book in a few days’ time and was eager to try for myself. After all, a good theory is one that can be put to practice. A few lines also resonated with me, even though it may have been only made-up anecdotes to help sell the book. The socks being made into potatoes, or keeping unopened items in particular struck me personally.
Either way. I started with getting all my clothes. From socks to hats. Everything.
The living room area was filled to the brim with clothes, bags, anything that was wearable or related to it. It looked worrying in some way. There was a lot I had not used for years. There were socks. A small mountain of them, all shaped like potatoes. But all I had to do was go one by one and ask myself if this particular item sparked joy or was necessary.
A few bags were quickly filled with clothes that I was giving away to charity – some of which no longer fit, some of which were no longer my style or something I did not wear as my ‘uniform’ anymore (I might talk about this later in another short).
I filled a large garbage bag with only ‘bad’ socks that fit loosely, were making my feet sweat like crazy (hehe), or had holes in them. Small note here, I usually patched or fixed socks like these in the past. I also finally opened the new ones that I had bought years ago and kept for ‘worse times’.
What remained were the cozy socks, the ones that fit and the unabused ones. Today these were narrowed down even further so that I only have one drawer of them. All neatly folded up and put in line. I no longer make potatoes out of them, and this actually helps with keeping them last longer – the material does not stretch out as quickly.
So what is the potato sock? Grab a pair of your socks. Yeah like that. Put them on top of each other. Good. Now push your hand through one of them so that it begins to fold backwards and rolls over the other sock as well. Thus, the snake consumes itself. And you have the potato sock. The oldest trick in the book of socks. It’s big, round and takes up more space than folding it three times. A monster. Fill a drawer with them and watch them roll around.
While I do not strive, nor encourage minimalism, there is a healthy amount of socks (not potatoes) one needs to function. Overabundance is something I’d say the older generation needed after experiencing events that left deep imprints in them. In some cases, these imprints are only left by the even older generation. It was their mental well-being shtick. “I have 90 socks and nobody’s gonna catch me unprepared.” Our generation’s mental shtick is probably “I like taking a step in my own four walls without breaking one of the twenty three flower vases.”
So, I stopped and gave it all a second thought – do I want this cycle to continue? Do I want to hoard socks for my two feet? Or should I start wearing them on my hands too? Do I want to have an amount that makes me last months without having to turn on the washing machine? Do I like wasted drawer spaces?
To come back to me pruning the clothes: The same went for all the other pieces of clothing. While I do not remember exactly, I know I did sell some of the stuff, gave some to charity and threw away some things that were used for over ten years.
The gist of the whole process is to do the ‘ikkini’ [In one go] motion where you just go through everything in a seamless motion. It’s also to spark that emotion or feeling in you that you have to get a taste of first. It’s similar to the dopamine rush you get when buying something. Apparently, humans love buying new things as much as they like to throw things away. Once you realise this feeling and get a hold of it, grow aware of it, it makes the next steps easier.
For books – I only got rid of ten or so, out of the many. They were all quite precious to me. However, going through the next category – papers was all the easier.
There was a lot again – invoices, guides, notes. Simply put many things that I no longer needed and narrowed down until I had only two or three folders with papers that had some use still – such as warranties that I can get rid of once they expire. The rest was recycled or put to better use.
Then I had small items. For whatever reason I had hoarded a lot of packaging materials, containers and some such, also tissue boxes as mentioned earlier. This was the major purge. I only kept higher quality boxes that were useful to store the remaining stuff in. I had a lot of tiny things ranging from electronics to all sorts of collectibles and toys. I also got rid of my clothing tag collection and only kept the ones that fit into my already manyfold collections – for example merchandise ones to a TV show.
The takeaway to this step is manyfold. While some of the boxes were meant to store small items and help ‘tidy’ they actually only created a bigger mess with being there. Existing. I created a ‘problem’ by what was meant to be a ‘solution’. The second takeaway is that I filled all my spaces with throwaway containers, intended for single use. Recyclables. Paper. While it is not waste as such, envision a room where you store everything in single-use containers, such as thin paper boxes, thin plastic containers (like what supermarket fruit comes in). Hello and welcome to the recycling facility, I live here.
What stood out to me in this category, were my plastic anime figurines. First, I considered selling all of them, but then I imagined what I had set as a goal. The vision of my future space. And the room was empty and characterless, soulless if you will, without them. I kept my ‘figgies’. Later, with some more trial and error, and a certain book on Feng Shui that explains the mystic arts in a logical way, I managed to elevate the figurines to a new height. This will be another topic for another time.
With the figurines, I also stumbled into the territory of items that had emotional value, or memories connected to them. I did say goodbye to some of these as well. Old postcards addressed to me and such.
In the end I threw away about 32 bags full of stuff, gave about three or so boxes of old toys to charity and sold a few bags of items. It left me with items that sparked joy and or were of use. It made cleaning easier. It made the noise go away. It helped me to focus and reevaluate what I was doing with my life. Basically, I had time to focus on what I wanted.
But big words aside, it’s not that simple. It never is. It did give me some clarity and a kick, but overall it is just that. A good activity that helps you reorganize and re-evaluate. Ironically enough, the whole fad is still in my brain, rent free, as the reader might notice to a point where I am giving advice to friends or family.
However, by now the small room manages to make me feel energised. It’s clean and crisp. There is motion in there still – I pull out items, make a mess on the desk with notes and such for writings, then clear everything away. After that, there is always room for the new, for the big idea, for the big movement that just so happens to come out of the blue and needs space to unfold. Space that would otherwise be cluttered with small items, cables that would entangle the idea, socks that would let the idea slip away through the holes.
To give a higher level commentary on the process. Throughout history, art history that influenced people’s lives specifically, there is a trend of ups and downs. A style that is overly pompous and oversaturated is replaced by something simpler, clean and refreshing. Only to get oversaturated again. This generates movement and motion that motivates evolution or progress, and also a lot of content (books, paintings, etc.). Today, it looks more convoluted with all sorts of movement going on simultaneously, even more so with the internet helping to spread everything like a wildfire.
But while it is sped up, the same movement is visible. Call it Baroque followed by Classicism, or call it minimalism followed by maximalism. It is there. Shaping the life of humans. Generating content, insights and opportunities.