We have a family of 5, so the house is often embarrassingly cluttered. But I asked my wife if we could declutter our office, which is often a larger version of that kitchen draw that you hide all the random stuff in. It’s usually quite an overflowing mess.
I like the idea of decluttering rather than cleaning. Clutter has the connotation that there are things that are in the way, things that need to be removed. I will be selling a bunch of books, we recycled tons of paper, threw away a huge bag of garbage, and did some re-organizing. Did we hide some stuff away, yeah. Is there still too much stuff, yeah. Do we still have a few random piles of things, yeah. But overall, we did decent job of decluttering. It’s far from clean, but it’s far from cluttered:
Some reflections, though:
- It seems that there is always too much clutter. And once we declutter, it’s bound to get cluttered up again. The analog to my heart is so apt, it’s almost crude.
- The hardest part about decluttering is that you have to choose to get rid of things. A few things, you cherish; but most things, you’re just afraid to throw away. But you know what needs to be done. I think sometimes, I need time to mourn before giving things up to God, but other times, I just need to stop thinking about it and just do it.
- It feels nice to have more room.
- Working on the room together with my wife gave way to some good conversation. So often we are divided in our work and duties, meaning much of our home time is often in separate parts of the house. And dinner is enjoyable, but with all 5 of us, it’s always a party. But here, being just the two of us, and having a relatively mindless task to do opened us up to just talk. No talk of the things we need to do. Or even intentionally being caring. Just talking about our day, our kids, about old pictures, about things we thought were funny. It was quite nice; and it just happened.
Brian Hui 