You don’t need to a be a disciple of Marie Kondo to appreciate the joys of tidying up, no matter how long it may take you to get around to it
Before my ex-wife pays a visit, I find myself tidying up a little more assiduously than usual. It’s not that she’s super neat, it’s just that she’s brutally honest about what she sees as my clutter.
I live in fear of a withering put-down, although I’ve learnt not to care so much. I must concede she can see the things I can’t, the objects I’ve become inured to.
I lose sight of the stuff around me, failing to recognise the dust that accumulates in the cracks of my life until I can’t move. Then I go on a domestic detox. But I’ve left it too late again.
Our children live with me at present, one meticulous teen who delights in clean surfaces and spatial harmony, and another who exults in chaos. It’s just his form of expression, I think, as I find myself somewhere in the middle of order and its opposite.
I certainly do appreciate a mess, the necessary by-product of anything worthwhile happening in the kitchen or living area, while I also love the calm which emanates from a tidy space where things have been put away.
I find the act of tidying to be a restorative, a meditation into my day and a way to collect and distill my thoughts and feelings. I’ve listed tidying as one of my hobbies on my dating profile. I guess it’s no wonder I’m still single.
I feel that dating sites should contain a few snaps of one’s living spaces, at the very least, as these might tell you a whole bunch more than a pic of someone in sunglasses on a mountain bike or stroking a cheetah while holding a glass of white wine.
The energy of my own home is concentrated in these myriad collectibles and icons generated from my life experience, knick-knacks and baubles that come from people I love and events I like to remember.
Although there are many less than there used to be, I still believe I could do with about only a fifth of them. My ex-wife, concerned at the clogged and stuttering Feng Shui which circles from these and might be playing havoc with her children’s emotional bandwidth, is having none of it.
In not so subtle ways, she has just suggested buying me an entire cupboard of new glasses, because, she says, she struggles to find one that’s not cracked.
When I then try and find one with a crack, I discover that she means they’ve been psychically cracked. They are the wrong kind of old. Although I disagree, the lines are drawn.
If I am honest then I must admit that much of what I possess is on the wrong side of that line and must go, or be moved, to ensure harmonious flow. Mostly out the back door.
Like that discarded tog bag under the chair in the lounge which has been there for at least a month. What prevents me from seeing that and doing something about it?
Watch, I’ll move it and unplug a cosmic flow that restores benevolence and plenty upon me. As soon as I know where to put it.
My favourite technique for ridding myself of some of these things is to break them on accident (that’s a mix of ‘on purpose’ and ‘by accident’. A trick I developed to take care of unwanted wedding gifts.)
It involves putting said breakable item (framed pictures, gravy boats and chipped cups) in a plastic bag and saying a gleeful ‘Ooops!’ as they shatter on the floor, neatly contained in the bag they’re about to be disposed in.
The act cannot be reversed – a benefit of being borderline psychopathic and divesting emotion from both people and objects around me. However, I believe this trick is within the grasp of anyone capable of making an impulse purchase. It’s just the reverse. An impulse ejection.
When I left our marital home, I was blessed with the wonderful opportunity to edit my life. Then, it was confirmed to me that the most malevolent Feng Shui energy known to humankind resides in Tupperware.
Especially when gone soggy in old age without lid or bottom. And in kitchen implements at the back of unused drawers, which have somehow formed a layer of mysterious stickiness that resists any healthy life form.
Cupboards full of forlorn clothes and shoes with worn soles tumble into the path of my new ambition and also have to go. Likewise, bland or domineering pictures on the wall, the inherited kind that are neither liked not loved but simply clog a space.
Channelling the ruthlessness of an outsider, I unhitch any germ of sentimentality that prevents me from black bagging things past their use-by-date and putting them at the back door, where they pyramid into a menacing tower before toppling towards the nearest charity shop. It’s stuff I could not give to friends, or I would be guilty of passing on a curse.
This domestic detox is not the exclusive activity of someone moving home. It is the duty of anyone privileged to live under a roof (including caves.) The spaces we live in attract junk. Dust-collectors, they’re called, in a world where dust is as inevitable as hair loss.
And just as some things must go, other things just have to be moved. (There’s that old tog bag again.) Healthy energy in the home is about opening these channels, unblocking windows, freeing up corners, getting rid of anything that blocks a doorway or collects putrefying vapours,
Malign energies fester in neglect. Like deworming children who live in a household where dogs roam, like the annual unblocking of the drains, it’s never not a good time to conduct a spring clean.
Leave a Reply