CLUTTER OR COLLECTION?
It’s OK to embrace our treasures, expert says
Don’t kill the clutter. Love the stuff you’re with!
Well, you don’t hear that very often. While decluttering messages bombard us, making us feel guilty and like failures, Dr. Christina Waters, PhD, is espousing a different message: Don’t be guilt-tripped into trashing beloved, if non-utilitarian, items.
“Embrace the fact that by living, working, making choices, you will create a body of objects, mementoes, and other byproducts of being alive and active. Let these accumulated accessories linger and work for you as much as they can,” says Waters, author of Inside the Flame: The Joy of Treasuring What You Already Have.
“Keeping a wealth of items in your life — objects, treasures, old souvenirs, beautiful nothings, memorabilia, tiny love notes, childhood toys, seashells, polished rocks — is proof of your unique identity,” says Waters. “Cherishing important clutter is a way of nurturing your own story.”
Clutter, or more accurately, accumulation, can be crucial in terms of sparking creativity, she says.
Those little notes around the computer, or the stack of magazines on the end table can provide visual prompts for our next project.
She’s not talking about stuff that is mindlessly accumulated, but rather mindfully collected and loved. Waters says that keeping a collection of treasured objects, such as family heirlooms, or handmade tchotchkes, is a way of honouring our own taste, our own history.
Ditch the mindset which seems to be all about searching for a socially accepted, one-size-fits-all living space, rather than choosing to cherish the workplace and living areas you’ve created, she says.
Living in a stripped down, zeroclutter living space can equal emotional emptiness.
Sure it helps us start anew and clean our living space, she says, but “at worst, it creates a generic nowhere. Zero clutter means zero creativity. The space that is sterile is no longer an individual, unique space. It could be anywhere. It could belong to anyone.”
Zero clutter equals zero inspiration.
You might be fine staying overnight in a chain motel room, she says, but you wouldn’t want to live for very long in a room that is cookie-cutter bland. The eyes and mind need inspiration.
“The treasured collections we may have built up over the years, those notes and books clustered around our work space, these are healthy clutter, in the sense of being able to stimulate new ideas and inspire creativity.”