A New Year clear-out doesn’t spark joy for me
NEW Year’s Eve, and thoughts turn to resolutions and various ‘improving’ regimes, from dry January and cleansing diets to journalling and gym membership. And hidden among the, well, clutter of our high hopes and good intentions, there also may be a plan for a spot of decluttering, if only to make space for new stuff acquired over Christmas. Decluttering was elevated to a creed some years ago and the discipline of KonMari was its first commandment. High priestess Marie Kondo preached about throwing out all possessions that didn’t ‘spark joy’, allowing a sense of calm and tranquillity to envelop our homes.
But the KonMari method seemed to fall out of fashion, particularly after the birth of Kondo’s third child, whereupon the neat freak basically admitted she had more to worry about than artfully folded clothes, bare walls and pieces of furniture with nothing in or on them.
In Kondo’s place there have been pale imitators including Stacey Solomon from the TV show Sort Your Life Out. Solomon has developed a three-step system of Strip, Sort and Systemise to tackle the mammoth job of decluttering our lives.
The idea is that we only keep the items that we really need or love and get rid of the rest. Solomon advises leaving our personal treasures and keepsakes until the very end when we are in the habit of letting go and won’t be too upset. Remember, she counsels, it’s better to have a few treasured items on display so you can enjoy them rather than having trunks of stuff in the attic.
She makes the obligatory promise about the power of decluttering to transform our lives.
BUT is the trade-off between giving away what to many of us is our past in return for more energy, time and space really worth it? Our old dolls, our children’s train sets, the collection of theatre programmes from the 80s, the dress we wore to our 21st, our first watch may be a lot of old junk in some respects. But they are also like signposts of our lives.
We may not remember much of our early years but our old doll or teddy bear reminds us that we were once a beloved child. A coloured scarf, a gift from a long-lost friend, is too precious to part with. The album of photographs from the J1 trip to America preserves the memories of that first long trip away from home.
A box of cheap cutlery, bought for our first flat. The children’s first bikes rusting in the shed, their school project on the Native American Indians, the Thomas The Tank Engine annuals.
Where does the time go? These boxes of mementos and stacks of objects freighted with meaning can tell us.
We humans can be divided into keepers and throwers, and our homes reflect that.
Either we have houses that resemble Aladdin’s Cave or a branch of Oxfam, full of stuff we’ve collected along the way and which can give claustrophobia to minimalists.
Or we have homes that are sleek and neatly ordered, where every object earns its keep and where a sense of tedium can infuse the atmosphere of calm. Where owners spend so many hours painstakingly preserving their aesthetic that it can seem they are the real slaves to their possessions, not those of us who can’t visit a charity shop without leaving with an armful of loot we didn’t realise we needed.
BUT unless our hoarding borders on a psychological sickness and we can’t even throw out an old kettle in case its parts could come in useful in future, we can ignore the dubious benefits of decluttering and go with our inclination, whether it is to spend 2024 gathering even more things to cram into our overstuffed cupboards or ruthlessly clearing out every last item.
Happy New Year, dear reader. And a pared back HNY, to those who are so inclined.