Peter Walsh gives us his insights into the importance of order
After 15 years as a professional organiser, our decluttering expert Peter Walsh unpacks the most important lessons he’s learnt along the way
What I do is out of the ordinary and I couldn’t love it more. I’m a professional organiser: I help people climb out from under the overwhelming and often paralysing effects of too much stuff in their homes and lives.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said that life is lived forward and understood backwards. For me, that couldn’t be more true. Any success I might enjoy as a professional organiser comes from the merging of all my different training and experience over the years. Being a teacher instilled in me the value of a clear, logical approach to teaching new subject matter. Working in the alcohol and drug field taught me about self-sabotage and destructive behaviours. My time in health promotion gave me insights into the value of encouraging positive life choices. A love of design taught me the importance of order and organisation in the home. Years of higher education gave me a basis of critical thinking and, I hope, a creative approach to problem solving. A combination of these skills and experiences has taught me how I can help people wrestle calm from chaos.
the power battle
Many people think organising is all about the ‘stuff ’, but nothing could be further from the truth. My work has taught me that all clutter is not the same and that our stuff wields a huge amount of power and control over us. One of my earliest cases illustrated this best of all. I was asked to help the mother of two teenage boys declutter her bedroom. The room held every item of baby clothing her sons had ever worn. To her family and friends, this was a wasted use of space and senseless clinging to unneeded clothing. In dealing with the baby clothes, it occurred to me to ask her one question: “Are your best memories with your children in front of you or behind you? ”This was a lightbulb moment for both me and for her. She dissolved into tears as she said “behind me”. In that moment, I could see that the baby clothes represented her perception of her value as a woman, as a mother and as a wife. To move forward, it was important that we dealt with those issues first, otherwise, to mindlessly declutter the space and discard the clothes would have been a cruel blow to her sense of worth and self-esteem. To my mind, the stuff we own has power. Every choice I make as a professional organiser is done with that thought in mind. We all surround ourselves with things for different reasons: we love it, it makes us feel good, or it signals our success to the world. But sometimes we cling to what we own for darker reasons: to deal with pain or grief, to avoid a sense of loss or to cope with a nagging feeling that ‘my life may turn on me and my stuff is the only source of comfort I might have’. It’s easy to think that all clutter is the same, but that’s not so. For some, the items that crowd our kitchens or living areas might be what I call ‘lazy clutter’: lack of time or motivation stops us from clearing up. Some clutter is what I call ‘I-might-need-it-one-day clutter’: that’s what you hold onto in anticipation of a range of imagined futures. The most difficult clutter to deal with is ‘memory clutter’: like the mother I mentioned earlier, that’s the stuff that reminds you of a person or event from the past. The fear is that in letting go of an item, you will lose a valued and treasured memory.
finding calm within the chaos
While to the uninitiated, all clutter might look the same, the moment I speak with a homeowner, I can gauge what we’re dealing with and which tack to take. For lazy clutter, it’s often a matter of establishing routines to ensure that items are not left around the house. For the I-might-need-it-one-day clutter, it’s about establishing limits for the categories of what we’re holding onto, so the space limitations of our homes dictate how much we can keep. For example, towels and linen should only live in the linen press and books on a bookshelf. For memory clutter, it’s about separating the memory from the object, finding what I call the ‘treasures’; that is, items with the most significant memory attached, and treating those objects with respect by displaying them, rather than burying them under dust in the spare room.
I’ve come to see that the things we own should help create the life we want, and that true happiness won’t come from the accumulation of things. The more we own, the more we have to take care of. The more we have to take care of, the more we need to store, clean or dust. The more we have to store, clean or dust, the more we have to worry about. It may seem a cliché, but I’ve come to understand that less really is more. If the stuff in our homes doesn’t fill us with a sense of peace, focus and motivation, then I would have to ask you: what is it doing in your life?