On cluttered spaces
Saturday, 7 March 2009 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI caught Definitely Not The Opera when the theme of the show was "The Lifecycle of Stuff." (mp3 here). It was light and fluffy, as DNTO is. But one suggestion by Will Straw, a historian and communications studies prof at McGill, made a lot of sense to me.
The idea meshes with a suggestion I've heard before, most recently by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
unclutterer on being faced with difficult downsizing decisions. The suggestion is: if you're waffling about getting rid of something, put a sticker on it with a date some time in the future. Three months, a year, whatever time makes sense to you. If you don't use it in that time frame, it's clutter and you can get rid of it.
That leads to the comment from Will Straw in the broadcast (at approximately 9m 51s; listening from 7m 56s gives enough context). He notes that anthropologists talk about “first and second burials" as an active choice of saying goodbye to someone or something; and an analogue is the gradual process of pushing something further away even though they might have some sentimental value. He suggests for example, moving a lamp which one needs to get rid of, from the middle of the living room to the corner of a less-used room to the basement to a yard-sale.
So, OK, we don't necessarily need to "mourn" our possessions. But for those of us who find it stressful to toss things away... perhaps we could benefit from a bit more time set aside to intentionally, explicitly say goodbye. Such as putting that sticker on it with a date, or doing the "put it in the basement" as an intermediate step.
But that's different than the situation that goes on in many of our houses (or our parents' houses, just sayin') where that process ends in the basement, because there's no intentional burial process; it's just hanging onto the stuff forever. There needs to be the last step of finishing the goodbye.
This seems to cut through some of the resistance I have to getting rid of things, by giving them a "proper" time-limited goodbye. (And if it turns out in the interim that you were mistaken, that you do have need to hang onto it- Lazarus is raised!)
The idea meshes with a suggestion I've heard before, most recently by
unclutterer on being faced with difficult downsizing decisions. The suggestion is: if you're waffling about getting rid of something, put a sticker on it with a date some time in the future. Three months, a year, whatever time makes sense to you. If you don't use it in that time frame, it's clutter and you can get rid of it.That leads to the comment from Will Straw in the broadcast (at approximately 9m 51s; listening from 7m 56s gives enough context). He notes that anthropologists talk about “first and second burials" as an active choice of saying goodbye to someone or something; and an analogue is the gradual process of pushing something further away even though they might have some sentimental value. He suggests for example, moving a lamp which one needs to get rid of, from the middle of the living room to the corner of a less-used room to the basement to a yard-sale.
So, OK, we don't necessarily need to "mourn" our possessions. But for those of us who find it stressful to toss things away... perhaps we could benefit from a bit more time set aside to intentionally, explicitly say goodbye. Such as putting that sticker on it with a date, or doing the "put it in the basement" as an intermediate step.
But that's different than the situation that goes on in many of our houses (or our parents' houses, just sayin') where that process ends in the basement, because there's no intentional burial process; it's just hanging onto the stuff forever. There needs to be the last step of finishing the goodbye.
This seems to cut through some of the resistance I have to getting rid of things, by giving them a "proper" time-limited goodbye. (And if it turns out in the interim that you were mistaken, that you do have need to hang onto it- Lazarus is raised!)
