In pursuit of less
How decluttering my home changed the course of my life. With pics 📷
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Eight years ago I read a book with a title that promised to change my life. It wasn’t about where to find happiness or how to pursue a more fulfilling existence. It was a book about tidying up.
And it did change my life. It transformed both my internal and external landscapes and how I view the world of things to such an extent, that I don’t recognise the person I was before I read this book.
In today’s column I share how decluttering my home in the pursuit of ‘less’ changed the course of my life.
Inheriting the domestic clean gene
I come from a lineage of intensely house proud people who are fastidiously clean and tidy, whether visitors are expected or not. I have inherited this domestic clean gene but give thanks for some level of dilution over the generations.
My 92 year old Grandma used to wrap her sofa in plastic to keep it from getting dirty, so sitting on it with any exposed skin would cause friction burns. My Mum disinfects units daily and after cooking a multi-course meal for 6 people, her spotless kitchen looks as though it’s been transplanted from a show home.
My Dad’s idea of a weekend well spent might include scrubbing the inside of the oven, pulling the fridge out to get a mop under it or wiping the tops of all the wardrobes in the house. Things he’ll do multiple times a year.
And me? When I was a kid, ‘play’ would often involve polishing my Mum’s brass, cleaning mirrors with scrunched up newspaper or a spot of ironing. This was in no way forced upon me; I enjoyed it. I got immense satisfaction from shiny surfaces, folding creaseless t-shirts and making my Mum happy.
And it taught me from an early age the work involved in maintaining a household (a lot of unpaid and unappreciated work), which equipped me with the basic but essential life skills needed to look after both myself and my living environment. This stuff isn’t taught in schools.
I remember first reading about how Nadiya Hussain – winner of The Great British Bake Off 2015 – gets her three children to do housework each Sunday for three hours, all family members mucking in and bonding to a soundtrack of 1980s classics and thinking, how excellent is that.
This spotless and spruced education and appreciation my parents instilled upon both me and my brother has persisted through to our adulthoods. For me, it has most strongly manifested in the form of an extremely low tolerance for clutter, mess and general things in my line of sight.
My ideal room would consist of something comfortable to recline on and no more than 4-5 other items, including furniture; it would be 85% empty space and clear surfaces.
Meeting and marrying my domesticity nemesis
But of course, we are all different. We come from diverse households and upbringings with their own unique traditions, priorities and expectations. And at no time in my life have I felt this more acutely than when I first moved in with my now husband.
Let me try to say this with as much love as possible. Because in every other respect, my husband is the most wonderful human I am privileged to have in my life. He is infinitely kind and considerate, patient and funny and is always thinking about others before himself – and he’s an excellent cook. He is the absolute best.
But when it comes to domestic cleanliness and tidiness, he is the direct inverse of me.
Where his clothes come off, they will remain on the floor – for days. If he didn’t live with me he wouldn’t make the bed or open any curtains or blinds. He stacks the dishwasher with what I can only assume are his eyes closed. He collects and displays dusty bottles of empty toiletries like a perverse exhibition curation. His office has been such an abject tip that my feet haven’t been able to get a purchase on any clear floor space.
His presence in our household is a perpetual state of we’ve just moved in or we’re just about to move out or we’ve just been burgled.
The true disarray of both my external and internal landscapes
But as much as I liked to think I was the epitome of balance and harmony, it was mostly superficial.
Whilst my home might have looked uncluttered on the surface, the insides of cupboards, drawers and wardrobes belied the true disarray of both my external and internal landscapes. I wanted the discord out of my mind, so I put it out of sight.
Let’s just shove it all behind a door or in a drawer and pretend none of it is really there. I was painting over rust.
Then on a trip to visit my husband’s family in the United States in 2017, his uncle told me about a book he had recently finished. ‘It’s called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo,’ he said.
‘You read a book about — tidying up?’
‘Yes. But it’s not just about tidying up,’ he said.
‘It’s about a way of thinking, of how to approach the tyranny of stuff, the detritus of life. How to learn to deeply appreciate what you hold dear to you and have the courage to bid thank you and fond farewell to the rest. So you’re left with much less and with what actually matters. It genuinely is life changing.’
I was intrigued and so I bought Marie’s book, long before she became a global name and had her Emmy-nominated hit Netflix series. I’m a believer in books finding you when you need them most. And this book found me when I needed it. I read it cover to cover and then I did the work – in 2018, I Marie Kondoed the entirety of my worldly possessions.
Marie’s promise to change my life
If you’re unfamiliar with Marie Kondo and her work, she is a Japanese cleaning consultant and her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (which has sold over 13 million copies worldwide) explains why – despite our constant efforts to declutter our homes and lives – we either don’t make progress or the results are short lived. ‘Papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles’, she says.
According to Marie, it’s because we’ve been approaching the whole thing wrong.
Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom us to pick away at our piles of stuff for eternity. Her book promises that if you simplify and reorganize your home following her specific method (and it really is specific), with detailed guidance for determining which items in your house ‘spark joy’, you will only ever have to do it once – your home will remain ordered and clutter-free forever more.
And you know what? She was right.
I worked through all the categories, starting with clothes. I had so many that up until that point, once a year I would pack away my ‘winter’ garments into boxes that were stored in the loft and bring down my summer ones. Then around 6 months later, I would do the reverse.
Not any more.
I turned the house over (including the loft) for every single thing that could be worn upon my body and piled them into one wretched, dusty mountain of mostly fast fashion tat in the garden.
Doing so had the same effect as those TV shows that aim to improve people’s diets. Only when confronted with a week’s worth of 3 litre Coke bottles, takeaways and sausage rolls piled up in one stomach-churning display before them do they realise, something has to be done.
I then moved on to the other categories – papers and documents, kitchen items, books, garden things, “memories”. Group by group, over snatched weekends spanning several months, I eventually worked through every single item I owned. And I embraced the ruthlessness of it all.
‘This seashell trinket box does not make me soar on the wings of joy and so I thank you for your service and memories, but you are out.’
What remained was treasure
What remained were only the things that either served an integral purpose (e.g. the coffee machine) or sparked deep and meaningful joy (which is different to feeling sentimental over an old concert ticket for example — that’s out). What was left was real treasure, mindfully stored away with reverence and treated with respect, from socks and spatulas to suitcases and secateurs.
From then on, the clear spaces my eyes landed upon within my home emptied my mind of noise and filled my heart with a sort of bliss. Everything had an identity, a place to exist and be thoughtfully used and appreciated.
Where there was once a gathering of half empty bottles of crusty nail polish, there was now a verdant house plant. Where there was once a drawer stuffed with tightly balled socks straining the fabric, there were now ordered rows of gently folded pairs.
As Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto says in how cleaning is good for you:
‘Cleaning practice, by which I mean the routines whereby we sweep, wipe, polish, wash and tidy, is one step on this path towards inner peace. In Japanese Buddhism, we don’t separate a self from its environment, and cleaning expresses our respect for and sense of wholeness with the world that surrounds us.’
I’d come downstairs in the morning and retire to bed in the evening enveloped by a sense of peace and clarity. No longer jarred by a constant reel of visual commotion, all around me and within me was calm and quiet. I felt as though I’d scoured out the rust before applying a fresh and bright coat of paint.
And I desired more of this feeling. Because it felt so good. I had cleansed my home of visual turbulence and wanted to extend the reach of its feel good powers.
Matsumoto goes on to say:
‘After you start cleaning your home, you can extend cleaning practice to other things, including your body. How you can apply cleaning practice to your mind is a question I want to leave unanswered, but if you practise cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning, you will eventually know that you have been cleaning your inner world along with the outer one.’
Applying the ‘cleansing’ principles to other parts of my life
Once I cleared up all the chaos, I found I was applying the same ‘cleansing’ principles to the things I consumed too. What started with applying Marie Kondo’s practices to articles I owned, evolved to become a slow and very gradual path of endeavouring to tread more lightly on the land.
Ever since, anything new I have brought into my home and into my life - from a piece of furniture to multi-surface cleaner - has not only had to serve its purpose, but also make me feel good about using it too. I take into account how it was made and how doing so impacts societies, our health and the environment – known as true cost economics.
This is an ongoing journey that has no destination, it’s a way of living I intend to embody forever. It is neither easy nor convenient and I’m far from perfect. But as my husband’s Uncle suggested it might do all those years ago, that book really did change my life and I have Marie Kondo to thank for that.
(Even if she did recently admit she had ‘kind of given up’ on tidying the house after the birth of her third child. I think that’s very reasonable.
Before and after photos from 2018
I documented my whole 2018 Marie Kondo decluttering journey with photos — below are the before and afters of a lot of the categories and how I went on to store the things that remained.
Six years later I can confidently say, the contents of these drawers, wardrobes and cupboards do indeed still look like these after pics.
(The same cannot be said for my husband’s. For my sanity, and probably his too, all his stuff lives in different cupboards, wardrobes and drawers to mine.)