Weekly Roundup 15: The Broken Precious Things

Recently, my sister and I were sorting through a couple of large boxes of Christmas decorations, one from our grandmother's house and one from our mother's. In our grandmother's box, we found a smaller box containing a nativity scene that had definitely seen better days:

We rolled our eyes a bit and laughed about it, calling it Nativity Apocalypse and wondering why anyone would have kept it for all these many years. Then I turned one of the figurines over and saw the word "Germany" stamped on the bottom.

My maternal grandfather's family was from Germany, and it was easy to imagine that at one time, this set had been very precious to them. Taken out every Christmas and lovingly packed away after. Maybe as a child my grandfather had looked at it under candlelight and felt a sense of holiday wonder. 

I don't know how the set got broken, only that it sat, completely forgotten for decades, in my mother's storage shed. But at one time, someone thought maybe they could fix it, that it meant enough to try.

We humans have such interesting relationships to our possessions. Sometimes, we throw them away too soon when they deserve a second chance. Other times, we hang on too long when they have outlived their worth. 

I have lone earrings whose partners have disappeared, clothes I like the look of but not the fit, a favorite cracked tea mug. I don't know if it's sentimentality or a sense of responsibility that compels me, but I'm trying to be more selective about what I allow to take up physical and emotional space in my life.

It's a work in progress, but I'm getting better at it. Even without reading Marie Kondo. (Which I still mean to do someday.)

Have a great week!

  

Joy Project: Play

Hello! Before I jump into the next chapter of Joyful, I'll update you on my quest for harmony in the cleaning out of my mother's house. I could not be happier to report that I've crossed the finish line. Thanks to a lot of help from a lot of people--and a very cooperative local real estate market--the sale of the house closed on Monday.

The last week was a little strange, full of competing moments of nostalgia and frustration. But as I swept out the garage last Saturday, I finally got the sense that the harmony of the home had been restored, and it was ready to receive its new occupant. It was a feeling of satisfaction more than sadness, and I was delighted when a large dragonfly flew into the garage and buzzed around for a bit. If you believe in such things, dragonflies symbolize adaptability, transformation, and new beginnings. They also remind us when we need to bring a little light and joy into our lives.  

Now I just need to restore harmony in my own home, which has been kind of neglected the past few months.

And, boy, was I ready to read a chapter about play!

Many animals engage in play. It's one way they learn appropriate social behaviors. If a pup plays too rough, its litter mates will let it know. Although human play is often much more complicated, it can also be quite simple. I hadn't really thought about it this way, but the book suggests that play is the only activity that humans do solely for fun. There's generally no monetary gain or survival of the species on the line.

I imagine we all have a pretty good idea of what constitutes a playful activity. But what makes for a more playful environment? What is "the shape of play?" Sorry, triangle, it's not you. Nor you, rhombus. Research supports the idea that the most joyful shape for humans is a circle. Sharp angles subconsciously evoke danger--teeth, thorns, and various potential injuries that clumsy people like me know all too well. A curved surface feels safer and more accessible, which in turn reduces stress and promotes creativity.

Unless you have an extensive collection of decorative plates, Hula Hoops, and dartboards festooning your walls, your environment is probably more angular than not. I know mine is. So now I'm going to consider the ways in which I can add more curves, circles, and spheres in places in my home that feel particularly stuffy. And I honestly don't think I could go wrong with a bubble machine.

Stay safe and healthy, everyone! See you next time!

Joy Project: Harmony

Happy Friday, and happy last day of July! It's been more than two months since my last post, and honestly it feels as if it could have been two weeks or two years. These are such strange times, and it's easy to lose track. But the real reason I've been absent is that I've been helping my mother downsize from a four-bedroom house to a tiny apartment.

Downsizing does not come naturally to my mother. She's a keeper, a collector, a saver. She's not the only one; women of her generation learned to "waste not, want not" and were expected to be the caretakers of a family's history through its artifacts--the dishes and quilts and photographs and mementos, sometimes going back generations.

I knew the house was full--that was more than apparent to the eye--but once my sister and I started digging in, the density surprised me. Every closet, every shelf, every drawer, every cupboard. I couldn't help but think of a black hole drawing in matter and compressing it until not an inch of space remained. I won't go into all the details at this point, but suffice it to say that the clean-out is requiring a significant amount of physical and emotional energy. And time.

So this is the context in which I read the next chapter of Ingrid's book, Joyful. The chapter entitled--wait for it--"Harmony".  (For anyone who does not believe the Universe has a sense of humor, I submit this bit of synchronicity as Exhibit A.) 

A significant component of harmonious surroundings is order. Though humans love things wild and messy sometimes, we are also drawn to order. Order implies safety and predictability, which were vital to early humans. "The greater the complexity in an environment," Ingrid writes, "the greater the need for an underlying harmony to bring a sense of order and ease to a space." Order is a manifestation of harmony, and "harmony offers visible evidence that someone cares enough about a place to invest energy in it."

I'll add to that a lesson I learned from my mother's house: if you do not invest energy in maintaining order, the resulting disorder will take that energy from you, and then some. 

For ideas on how to promote harmony within a space, many people turn to the Chinese art of feng shui. And although it is prone to mystical overtones, it really is just about the smooth flow of energy. For me, a big part of that is simply paying attention. We get so good at overlooking things that we hardly notice the stack of mail on the table or the chair that everyone bumps into. Ingrid describes this as "finding friction at a moment when you really want momentum."

So far, 2020 has been full of friction of all kinds, and it doesn't appear that it is going to get much smoother in the near future. But as I move forward with the idea of harmony fully planted in my brain, I'm going to concentrate on reducing the friction within my control. 

Wishing you a harmonious start to the month of August!

   

Kon-do or Kon-don't?

Japanese organizing consultant and author Marie Kondo is all the rage right now. Her 2011 book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up is an international bestseller, and she has a new show on Netflix. Her method, called KonMari, involves these six initial steps:

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• Commit yourself to tidying up.
• Imagine your ideal lifestyle.
• Finish discarding first. Before getting rid of items, sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose.
• Tidy by category, not location.
• Follow the right order. (I don't know what that is, because I haven't read the book.)
• Ask yourself if it sparks joy.

The crux of the process is getting rid of items that lack value, and (in the case of clothes) goes like this: 

• Take everything out of closets and drawers.
• Make a big pile.
• Consider each item individually to determine whether it sparks joy.

I am intrigued by the sparking joy part, but I also know that I don't have the stamina right now to KonMari my life. If I were to make a pile of all my clothes, in a few days, I would have...the same pile of clothes, but with a couple of helpings of guilt and irritation on the side.

But that doesn't mean I can't take small steps toward "life changing magic," so my Take It or Leave It for last week was to clean one shelf or drawer every day. This was in addition to the routine household tasks that somehow need to be done approximately every six minutes. 

Although I didn't go full Kondo, I actually made demonstrable progress. Most of my projects took less than ten minutes, and it was pretty satisfying to throw stuff away. (BTW, I didn't ask if the old underwear sparked joy; I just pitched them.) 

I look at this week as practice for a time in the future when I'm willing to commit to a big KonMari purge. But maybe if I wait long enough--decades, hopefully--I can jump right into Margareta Magnusson's book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, which, in a nutshell, involves getting rid of all my crap before my boys have to deal with it.

This mini-KonMari Take It or Leave It is a Take It, but probably only two or three times a week instead of daily.  

I'll leave you with this quote from Beauty and the Beast Marie Kondo: 

It is only when you put your house in order that your furniture and decorations come to life.