the quest for the pleasantly livable living space

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris

I am on an old quest with a couple of new gurus. It has nothing to do with meditation or spirituality. My goal is to organize, de-clutter and reclaim my living space. And, since my home is not small and we have been in it for 22 years, this will not be an easy process or a short journey. The key is to recognize that these are not "things" I am sorting through - they are memories and I can keep those memories alive without holding on to a houseful of junk.  

I have written about this before because I have struggled with this need to let go of the old and step into the new for years, mostly unsuccessfully. Lately, I've begun to make progress and it feels good.

First, I read an article in O magazine about how they reclaimed their office space. Apparently, those who "traffic in insight and enlightenment" as the article put it, have their own baggage to deal with and judging from the photos in the article, the folks at O hadn't taken out their emotional trash in a LONG time. They described the cluttered chaos as being "in the grips of a mass material psychosis." Know that feeling? I certainly do...    

So, they hired an organizational guru named Peter Walsh. (Google him and you'll see there are entire empires built on our collective need to get organized...) He said he could "help them enormously, but there's going to be a bit of pain." Yep, I know that feeling, too.  

It turns out the problem the O staff has is the same one I have - they "put their collective heart and soul" into their efforts, so the material things associated with those efforts take on more importance than they deserve. This only becomes clear after the purging begins (step one in the reclaiming process) and you see that donating or tossing those things you thought were important has no negative impact on your life, at all. In fact, getting rid of those things improves it.   

"A clean organized office fosters creativity; a messy space makes you feel overwhelmed before you start working," Walsh says, so everything that "serves no essential purpose" has got to go. Work spaces, desk tops, counter tops and table tops are for working, eating, etc. - not putting things on. Chairs and sofas are for sitting - not draping or piling things on. Halls and stairs are for walking - not stacking stuff in. Sounds simple enough...

I used the Walsh method to de-clutter and re-organize my kids' rooms. They are married adults and their rooms were still shrines to their high school and college glory days. Talk about emotional baggage...but, once Mom got the hang of filling up trash bags and making trips to the Goodwill, it became clear that unloading emotional baggage is not only possible, it's exhilarating.     

Enter guru number two. He is a Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, an interior design wizard. A well-organized friend gave me his book, Apartment Therapy: the Eight-Step Home Cure, after seeing what I had accomplished in the new guest rooms. She said the book would take my quest "to the next level" and while I've only begun reading it, I can see she is right.  

One of the things Gillingham-Ryan talks about is how our homes become uncomfortable because they are cluttered and baggage-laden. For example, he says, "When we take something new into our home, we rarely let go of something else. This is how our home gains weight, grows unhealthy and begins to nag at us." By visualizing how you want your home to look, remembering how spaces you feel comfortable in are organized, and using his handy eight-week plan, you can put your home on a diet, help it become more healthy and eventually, stop its whining...

I've not started the eight-week plan yet, but I have been throwing away and donating as I take "Christmas" down and put "year-round" back up. The other day, I made a bold move. Instead of filling the living room mantle with the same pictures that have graced it for years, I polished that mantle with lemon oil and left it empty. A few days later, I bought my first piece of GA Folk Art - a clay vase with some (clay) leaves wrapped around it and a (clay) hummingbird perched on the side. That vase told me it was perfect for that empty mantle and it was right.

I haven't boxed up the old pictures that used to live on the mantle yet, but the smile that bird vase brings me will make doing that a lot easier because now I know that the memories will remain, even if the photos aren't sitting there collecting dust.