There's a category of Thing that it may be helpful to look at – things you love, but whose departure would nevertheless be helpful.
Beloved Marie Kondo, who has revolutionised the homes and daily lives of more people than she will ever meet or know, gave us a most valuable key to whether we should keep something: does it spark joy? It's so important to her approach that she wrote a whole book about it (ignore the reviewers who say it adds nothing to her first book; it does, and it's worth reading).
She said (you probably know this) to take the time to go through all of your possessions, taking each one singly and separately into your hands, asking your interior self the crucial question, "Does this spark joy?" If it doesn't, you thank it for all it has taught you and done for you, bless it on its way to new service, and out it goes; if it does spark joy, you keep it. What a brilliant system, and one that has changed many lives, helping countless people get back in touch with the soul of their homes and belongings.
I venture to suggest that there are specific occasions when this doesn't go far enough. Three, that I can think of.
The first is if you are one of those people who lives in a small house shared with others (your family probably) who are all happily accumulating possessions (as you are yourself) and all of them spark joy for all the people but now the house is too full. The things spark joy but the living environment does not. If this is you then there's a mythical animal designated as your patron saint; the dragon. Its lair is filled with a huge sliding mound of treasure — and it knows and loves and jealously guards every single one of its things, because all of them spark joy for a dragon. That's okay as far as it goes but I put it to you that quality of life rises sharply if one chips away at the situation.
The second occasion when sparking joy doesn't go all the way is when you have a specific goal in mind. Perhaps you are redecorating your home, or maybe you want to create a capsule wardrobe in which all the garments go with each other so choosing what bottoms to wear with which top and accessories becomes easy. For such a capsule wardrobe you'd likely want to reduce or eliminate patterned garments and select a particular range of neutrals and accent colours. You might have quite a pile of garments that spark joy but would make attaining your objective impossible. So you either have to abandon your plan or bless on their way some clothes that most certainly spark joy. Maybe, even, you don't enjoy housework and are sick of dusting and long for a space where a quick swoosh round will do the job. So you might choose to digitise your photos standing all around in frames, even though their physical presence sparks joy. You might send some of your ornamental additions to Freegle or Goodwill so they can spark joy somewhere else. That kind of thing. Streamlining.
And the third scenario is if you are aiming for minimalism, a word that has as many definitions as it has practitioners, it seems. Personally I think minimalism is all in the word itself — as little as possible, it means. To me, the practice of minimalism is owning as little as you reasonably and practically can. Obviously this looks different for different people. For instance, I can conceive of a minimalist family of a mother with three children, all of whom have toast for breakfast; so their form of minimalism might have few gadgets but a toaster could be one. In my house we eat any form of bread but rarely, so the toaster was Freegled long ago.
At this stage of my life (I am growing old and find my growing collection of health issues increasingly harder to shift) I am also thinking about the idea of death-cleaning that came to us from Sweden. It's the concept of cleaning down the decks now, while you still can, so that when you reach the end your family will be left with only a modest collection of stuff in good order, to sort out and disperse.
I am also greatly attracted by the life and philosophy of this man. This was a re-visit to his life. Kirsten Dirksen (do you know her Youtube channel? Wonderful) made a video about him before. I find both videos very inspiring.
My father travelled the world, and he kept all his clothes ready to go in plastic bags. He owned very little, and he was always leaving. Perhaps it was from him that I inherited a component to my nature that feels the need to be ready, at any moment with no warning, to leave. In any situation in life, of this I am sure — I want whether I stay or whether I go to be determined by other considerations than the stuff I own. And if I stay, I find owning very few possessions has always contributed helpfully to the overall wellbeing of the household. Put simply, someone has to live in the little box room, right? Why should it be someone else? And of course many times my situation had the inbuilt assumption I'd be sharing a room with another person, thus halving the available space at a stroke. Sometimes I haven't had any kind of room to call "my own" or "our own". Master bedroom? Noooo. We slept (comfortably and happily) on the living room floor or on boards on the attic joists. No problem.
So, with one thing and another, life made the possibilities offered by minimalism very apparent to me.
All this means that asking "Does this spark joy?", while being an excellent and apposite question, may not take you all the way — if you are a dragon, if you have a specific objective, or if you are going for minimalism. In any of those three scenarios, some of what sparks joy will have to go.
Today I want to show you two items I had that sparked joy, which was why I had them.
One was this yellow t-shirt.
The other was this Wedgewood teacup.
I gave the yellow t-shirt to someone for whom all things yellow spark joy. The teacup is waiting for the charity shops to re-open.
Absolutely they sparked joy. I loved them. But the colours I dress in have changed (I might tell you a bit about that at some point) and to be honest I drink out of mugs. So away they go.
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