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Memories and Mementoes Part Two
Is there such a thing as meaningful clutter? A neatnik would likely say no. But many of us answer with a resounding YES!
We've seen a flurry of books extolling the virtues of minimalism, especially in the spring when everything is about spring cleaning and downsizing. Certainly both are important - it's just that the clean freak may be incapable of distinguishing the baby from the bathwater or the trees from the forest!
Amidst all the Marie Kondos and professional purging gurus of this world, though, there is at least a modest backlash. I was just reading over a couple of newspaper articles I had clipped last year and they reflect my thoughts quite well. One was by Nathalie Atkinson and appeared in the Globe and Mail on May 13; the other, "Clutter or Collection?" is by Joanne Richard and appeared in the Citizen on January 21. The latter article gives the example of a typical chain hotel room that is, as she puts it, "cookie-cutter bland". OK for spending a night or three in, but it never really feels like home. I also recall when the fashion in workplace design shifted in the 70s to the open-concept office. Of course, since they were spending half their waking hours there, workers wanted to make the space their own so then screens and baffles were erected and soon the "open" office was a maze of cubicles and we were the white mice scrambling through to earn our daily chunk of cheese. In the 80s, 90s and beyond, further efforts were made to depersonalize the workplace and convert us all to the "universal footprint". Well, if the shoe fits... but sadly for many of us, it didn't.
As both these articles point out, it's one thing to value experience over "stuff" but the material things you've collected over the years and decades serve as triggers for the life experiences (whether happy or sad) you've had over the course of your life. This was vividly brought home to me (quite literally) when we suffered a break-in in January of 2000. First we had to figure out what precisely had been taken. Then we had to figure out the replacement cost of these items - only to discover that while the replacement cost might not be that great, some of the items were simply not replaceable. Accessories or bits of costume jewelry I'd picked up on my travels, for example. And how do you put a value on peace of mind and feelings of violation of personal space? The burglars had opened my nightstand and strewn about a number of personal letters and sympathy cards sent to me following the death of my father just two months earlier. An alarm clock had been tossed across the room, perhaps in a fit of pique at not finding what they really wanted. Luckily the only family member home at the time had been the cat and she seemed relatively unscathed by the experience but wasn't about to tell me anything - except maybe that I was late with her dinner!
To give both hoarders and purgers their due, I will say that it's been in the course of clearing out various accumulations of stuff - drawers, closets and so forth - that I've discovered those little gems I had long since forgotten about. Sorting and categorizing is a process that, for me at least, is best tackled in various phases depending on my mood and the time I have available. Of course, in a natural disaster or other emergency or crisis situation, one doesn't always have that luxury; when life is reasonably calm and stable, that seems like the best time to approach such matters.
Stay tuned!
We've seen a flurry of books extolling the virtues of minimalism, especially in the spring when everything is about spring cleaning and downsizing. Certainly both are important - it's just that the clean freak may be incapable of distinguishing the baby from the bathwater or the trees from the forest!
Amidst all the Marie Kondos and professional purging gurus of this world, though, there is at least a modest backlash. I was just reading over a couple of newspaper articles I had clipped last year and they reflect my thoughts quite well. One was by Nathalie Atkinson and appeared in the Globe and Mail on May 13; the other, "Clutter or Collection?" is by Joanne Richard and appeared in the Citizen on January 21. The latter article gives the example of a typical chain hotel room that is, as she puts it, "cookie-cutter bland". OK for spending a night or three in, but it never really feels like home. I also recall when the fashion in workplace design shifted in the 70s to the open-concept office. Of course, since they were spending half their waking hours there, workers wanted to make the space their own so then screens and baffles were erected and soon the "open" office was a maze of cubicles and we were the white mice scrambling through to earn our daily chunk of cheese. In the 80s, 90s and beyond, further efforts were made to depersonalize the workplace and convert us all to the "universal footprint". Well, if the shoe fits... but sadly for many of us, it didn't.
As both these articles point out, it's one thing to value experience over "stuff" but the material things you've collected over the years and decades serve as triggers for the life experiences (whether happy or sad) you've had over the course of your life. This was vividly brought home to me (quite literally) when we suffered a break-in in January of 2000. First we had to figure out what precisely had been taken. Then we had to figure out the replacement cost of these items - only to discover that while the replacement cost might not be that great, some of the items were simply not replaceable. Accessories or bits of costume jewelry I'd picked up on my travels, for example. And how do you put a value on peace of mind and feelings of violation of personal space? The burglars had opened my nightstand and strewn about a number of personal letters and sympathy cards sent to me following the death of my father just two months earlier. An alarm clock had been tossed across the room, perhaps in a fit of pique at not finding what they really wanted. Luckily the only family member home at the time had been the cat and she seemed relatively unscathed by the experience but wasn't about to tell me anything - except maybe that I was late with her dinner!
To give both hoarders and purgers their due, I will say that it's been in the course of clearing out various accumulations of stuff - drawers, closets and so forth - that I've discovered those little gems I had long since forgotten about. Sorting and categorizing is a process that, for me at least, is best tackled in various phases depending on my mood and the time I have available. Of course, in a natural disaster or other emergency or crisis situation, one doesn't always have that luxury; when life is reasonably calm and stable, that seems like the best time to approach such matters.
Stay tuned!