"Out of clutter, find simplicity."
Noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said in an interview with Cosmic Search Magazine that Albert Einstein’s work “revolved around three rules, which apply to all science, our problems, and times:
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
From discord make harmony. and
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
This past weekend, my husband Morris asked if I’d help him to organize the closet in his office. His office is in the second-largest bedroom here in our house, and he spends time there learning and practicing tai chi, qigong, and kung fu, in addition to doing his record-keeping for his business. (For those of you who don’t know, he teaches tai chi and qigong at a number of places and facilities in southern New Jersey.)
His office closet holds things like office supplies, photos, a filing cabinet, printer paper, other types of files, and suitcases (because there is space for them there, not because it’s 100% logical).
We decluttered the closet using the method I teach in The Declutter Course, and the entire project took us under three hours—which included time going through the insides of binders and sorting through two bins of documents.
We started by removing the stuff at the top of the closet and worked our way down, until the entire closet was empty (save for the filing cabinet, because it is full, and too heavy to move without unloading it). We decluttered a bunch of stuff (more on that in the next paragraph). Then we cleaned the shelves and corners to remove dust and cobwebs, and dry mopped the floor. Finally, we put the things we were keeping back into the closet in a way that made sense, and made it more user friendly. Now the closet feels significantly lighter, though the same cannot be said about our living room. 😂
All finished!
A place for everything and everything in its place.
What we let go, and why
From the closet, we decluttered
two suitcases, because we had SEVEN suitcases for two people, and that is at least two too many. We kept one large and one carry-on each, plus this one mid-sized one we like;
two sleeping bags, because we don’t camp anymore, and hadn’t used them in the 8-1/2 years we’ve known one another;
several folders and binders—we kept some “just in case”, but sometimes too many is too many, so we let the extra go';
a bunch of old documents and product guides for appliances and tools. The old documents included things like bank records and really old tax returns, and those went into the shredding pile. The product guides we decluttered were because we either don’t own the item anymore, or don’t need the guide (most are available online);
some office/school supplies that we don’t need (crayons anyone?)
several old phone chargers and cables, for phones or computers we don’t own anymore;
two old laptops, because they were just taking up space; and
several digital cameras we don’t need anymore thanks to our iPhones.
I am telling you the what and the why for the items we decluttered, so that you can understand better our decision-making process. Because decluttering is literally making decision after decision for each item you touch.
During our closet-clearing process, I put the things we were getting rid of outside the room. A few times, I discovered Morris had started creating new piles of things to get rid of right next to things we were keeping, and I moved those things to either the shredding pile (if required) or out of the room (if it needed to be recycled or donated). At first, he thought I was being a tad obsessive, but I tried to explain that it was a way of avoiding decision fatigue (which is an actual, real thing).
Having done A LOT of decluttering, and having created The Declutter Course, I knew that keeping those things in a pile next to stuff we were keeping just meant we had to handle them again, and to revisit whether they were keep or not. If a decision is already made, then the item goes into the appropriate container/pile/location, it doesn’t just get to sit around for you to have to handle it and decide again.
Why decluttering feels hard
If decluttering feels like A LOT, it’s not just you.
Decluttering feels taxing because we have so many decisions to make. It feels overwhelming because we have emotional attachment to objects, based on nostalgia, fond memories, guilt, or even shame. Plus we have usually deferred making decisions about these objects that we don’t really like, or don’t use, for so long that it has built itself up into a “big thing” in our minds.
It’s entirely logical for you to have issues about dealing with clutter because all that stuff that’s clutter? It was something you brought into your life for a reason. Maybe it was a gift from someone you know and love, so the feelings about the person are attached to the thing. Maybe it was a something you bought because you aspired to be (or become) a different sort of person: one who used or wore that item, one who behaved in a way that required it, etc. There’s an energetic attachment to each of those things, even if it’s office supplies or sleeping bags, because there are memories attached to them, and feelings as well.
So if you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed or bogged down by things, it’s not just you. It’s completely understandable. And you can do something about it, by working through not just your clutter, but your feelings. Whether you use Marie Kondo’s technique of thanking the object for its service, or you opt in to The Declutter Course to work through things, or you find your own way, decluttering will be easier for you if you process and work through the emotions, not just the stuff.
Circling back to the quote at the start of this post:
I’d argue that we found simplicity out of our clutter, created harmony out of discord, and took a difficult closet situation and found opportunity by letting go of things we don’t need so that we have the opportunity to easily locate the things we do need.
The Declutter Course is open for registration. A live session of the course begins on March 1st, just in time for spring cleaning. More details can be found here.
