My friend Amelia[1] just finished clearing out her parents’ house. “I don’t want to leave that kind of mess for my kids,” she told me. “It’s overwhelming, and I don’t want them to get into the kinds of squabbles that my siblings and I kept getting into. But there’s so much junk to go through. I really hate it.”
Amelia has always been my role model for clearing out clutter. Her house always looks pristine. She has plenty of photographs and knickknacks, but nothing like what I have in my home. I said, “What junk? You don’t have any junk.” She just laughed and said, “There’s always junk.” Amelia, a longtime fan of the anti-clutter approach advocated by Marie Kondo, told me that she had discovered a new decluttering guide, one that directly addresses the need for parents to clear out unnecessary belongings so that their children don’t have to. Her new go-to book was called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, by Margareta Magnusson, which encourages readers to adopt a more minimalist lifestyle and supposedly turns “letting go” into “fun.”
My parents had never heard of Swedish Death Cleaning, but when they were a few years younger than I am now, they started clearing out their apartment. They gave away books and curios, including a silver tray that was one of the few mementos we had from my mother’s mother, and a tiny tea set that my niece had yearned to inherit. Unfortunately, they didn’t clear out several file cabinets crammed with old bills and outdated paperwork, which meant that we still had to spend long hours going through their stuff. Even more unfortunately, their unthinking tossing of items their children and grandchildren might have treasured counteracted our appreciation of what they had done.
I like the idea of neatness and have tried numerous times to take on the extra baggage in my home. You can check out an article I wrote about it a few years ago by clicking here. I live with a spouse who is wonderfully orderly and yet extraordinarily patient with my neatness ineptitude. I love the feel of a well-organized home, but I cannot make it happen in my own house. I wonder if it’s a sign of some unexamined psychological flaw in myself, something that I have never fully analyzed.
But one of the great things about being older is that I have come to accept that “I yam what I yam,” as Robin Williams sang as Popeye the sailor man. I recognize that I can change some of my behavior, but not all of it; and that not being able to change doesn’t make me a bad person. My daughter-in-law recently introduced me to a new book on decluttering by KC Davis, called How to Keep House While Drowning.
While the book is mostly for a younger generation who are dealing with children, jobs, and seven hundred other activities, it works for those of us in the Troisieme Age, who have discovered that we don’t have the energy to do all of the cleaning and clearing tasks we might assign ourselves. These days, even my highly organized husband has trouble clearing out the mail that accumulates in the course of a few weeks.
KC Davis makes the case that people with pristinely neat homes are not better than those of us with somewhat disorganized ones. I have embraced this truth: there is nothing inherently good or bad about tidiness or lack thereof. I don’t have to feel ashamed about not having everything neat and orderly. On the other hand, given that I value neatness, there’s nothing wrong with working toward being neater, as long as I don’t fall back into the pattern of criticizing and devaluing myself when I don’t meet my own expectations.
Embracing this concept has already led to a small change in my thinking and behavior. I don’t have to change my personality or lifelong patterns. But maybe I can start to gently get rid of some of my clutter. I’ve quietly started shredding and throwing away old files and donating old books that I haven’t read for years. No excitement. No huge goals. As I’m working on small decluttering projects, I’m also thinking about a conversation I had with my friend Ann during the pandemic, when I was trying to clear out some old stuff of my son’s. I had given some clothes to Goodwill and turned others into rags, and had started on a box of old toys, with the intention of giving some of them away and throwing out any that could not be used. In the box was a bedraggled doll, which had been well-loved and carried everywhere for a couple of years and then, like Puff the Magic Dragon, discarded. The doll was dirty and torn and not something I could give to another child, but I couldn’t throw it away. “I’m being silly,” I said. “Why am I holding onto it?”
Ann, who was in her late eighties at the time, said, “What does it matter? You’ve been tossing out other stuff, right? So if, for whatever reason, you’re not ready to throw out the doll, don’t. Put it back in a box and leave it. You don’t have to throw everything away.”
I like this approach, which is a great way to move forward as we age. It also reflects my understanding, as a therapist, of how we humans change. Paradoxically, the best way to change is to make peace with who you are. Once you’ve accepted yourself, with all of your conflicts, confusion, and flaws, you might just find that change occurs spontaneously.
Image credit: 123RF stock image #127259476 svetlam87
[1] Names and identifying info changed for privacy