Spring Cleaning

Spring is here! Every morning the birds are singing, leaves and flowers are unfurling, the world is reanimating after a short but tiresome winter. I find the turning on of the natural world, the start of the growing season, to be absolutely mesmerizing. When I can’t be outside, I find myself drawn to the windows, staring outside, what is happening, what can I see? There is just such a feeling of renewal when Spring arrives, it’s energizing and refreshing, like jumping into a lake on a hot day.

Along with the urge to plant seeds, examine outdoor plant growth and watch and listen to the very busy birds, I also get the urge to clean up. My mother would always say that as the sun gets stronger and the days get longer we start to notice how grimy everything is. Back in the old days, when homes were heated by wood or coal stoves, and lit by candles, cleaning in the Spring was necessary, everything was so dirty. My grandmother lived in Greenwich Village, the heart of NYC, and the grime in her apartment could be intense. But for me, spring cleaning has become synonymous with decluttering.

The thing about decluttering is that it forces you to look at and think about everything you own. And in modern American society, there is so much stuff, overwhelming amounts of things in every home. Just during the course of my lifetime, people’s attitudes about possessions have been changing. Minimalism has become much more popular as well as the awareness of how damaging overconsumption and its garbage is to our environment. My kids grew up in an age of abundance, my parents in an age of scarcity. Many people in my generation have also had to clean out the near hoarder level accumulations of their aging or deceased parents.

You are probably not surprised to learn that modern clutter originated in the Victorian period at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Littering our homes with useless pieces of crap has not been around that long, although it certainly originates in some deep human inclination. The tendency to collect objects is seen in both children and adults, in all human cultures. Archaeologists discovered evidence at a site in the Kalahari region that humans over 100,000 years collected crystals from a distant site. The only way it could have gotten there is if someone carried it. It’s fascinating to think of the network of interactions that must have taken place in order for those object to get that far.

I wandered around a lot in my 20’s, more than once living out of a backpack for extended periods. Even when I stayed in one place for a while, it wasn’t long before I packed up and moved from there. Anytime you have to carry your possessions around on your back, you are going to realize how little you really need. So it wasn’t until my husband and I bought our first house that the heavy acquisition started. Honestly, I had no idea babies and children generated so much stuff. When all the storage room in my house started to fill up, I realized how important it was to keep extra things moving out, not exactly one in and one out, but close enough. One of the biggest takeaways I’ve gotten from the many (many) decluttering books I’ve read is that decluttering is not a one off, if’s a lifestyle.

Even though I had stopped putting things I didn’t want anymore in the attic and basement, there was a lot of accumulation already there. And then we had a house fire in that attic filled with things we didn’t really need. There were treasures mixed in, too, and the loss of them was devastating. But in some ways it was a relief, we had to deal with all that stuff, sort it and get rid of the extra, all the junk that we had known we had to deal with eventually, but were seriously overwhelmed by. The fire forced us to reckon with our possessions. Because all our stuff was packed up after the fire and we got it all back at once after not seeing it for 2 years, we could see the pile with fresh eyes. More than one item made me say - why do we even have that?

One of the biggest challenges in decluttering is figuring out where to take the stuff that you don’t want any more. I find that I hold on to things that I don’t want mostly because either I spent money on it and “it’s still good” or someone gave it to me. Both of these are obstacles that can be more easily overcome if you know it’s not going to the landfill. Nobody wants to just throw stuff away, that’s something that the older generations and the greener new generations have in common. In the 70’s, one of the mottoes of the environmentaI movement was reduce, reuse, recycle. Now there’s the Zero Waste movement and they’ve expanded this to 5 guidelines: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. I love the emphasis on Refuse - don’t bring anything you don’t want into your house. Free stuff is not free - there’s always a cost.

Another major motivation for doing the hard work of sorting my shit is the thought of my kids having to deal with it when I die. I have the mental image of them just throwing all of it into a dumpster, good stuff, stuff that they might actually want, because it’s just too much for them to deal with. I want to make it easier for them. And then there are the benefits that keeps the decluttering momentum going - it feels good to live in a clutter free home. The truth is, having an organized home that works for you is more efficient requiring less time and energy to manage, and giving you more time to do the activities that you enjoy.

One of the best ideas I got from Marie Kondo is that if you love an object, if it sparks joy for you, you should have it out, not hidden in a box somewhere. If you do one of her activities, put everything you own that’s in one category together and just take out the things you don’t like. You will see that the things that remain are even more beautiful. There is the well known saying everyone quotes by William Morris about not having anything in your home that is not useful or beautiful. I’ve found that these suggestions are empowering because there is no objective truth to it. It’s what you love, it’s the tools that you use, it is about creating a home that supports and is satisfying to you.