The apartment is slowly taking shape, little by little. I’ve been able to excavate my desk underneath stacks and stacks of paper; I’ve sold about a hundred or so books to Half-Price, the region’s largest chain of secondhand bookshops; I’ve donated hundreds of dollars worth of household goods to Goodwill; and I’ve thrown away scads and scads of boxes, many of which I’d lugged to Colorado from Texas and back.
It feels so good, so freeing to downsize. To breathe more oxygen and stretch my arms as far as they can reach without touching yet another pile of boxes or paper. I can’t believe I had tax forms and pay stubs and menus from the late 1990′s stuffed in my filing cabinet, or that I had kept books that I had read once and never intended to again. I love books and can’t possibly live in a world without them, but at some point I realized that in order to make room for more in my life, I seriously needed to give back to the universe many more, to put them into the hands and bookshelves of someone else who might enjoy them as much as I did.
New York Times contributor Pico Iyer wrote an essay in yesterday’s paper about the joys of living on much, much less. Iyer, a renowned travel writer from a privileged Ivy-League-Eton-Oxford background, could probably have continued to live the charmed, upper-class life he had always known, but he chose instead to move to Japan and live in a two-room apartment near Kyoto with his partner and their two children. In the essay he writes of the stark simplicity of his life — no cell phones, no Internet, no cable, and no readily accessible lingua franca — and the joys he finds within its inexplicably expansive boundaries. To Iyer life isn’t about material objects or the false stimuli of manufactured, prepackaged entertainment, but about freedom from just those things. The pursuit of happiness doesn’t resonate with him; he prefers to find the happiness that surrounds him everyday.
As many have commented on that essay, Japan can be very seductive to people wanting to escape the modern challenges of the Western world. When you don’t speak the language (I spoke only six words and knew not a single character when I first arrived in Japan in 1994), the citizens treat you more as a guest than as a member of the community, and you’re surrounded by so much unfamiliarity, where the rules of social engagement are upended, it’s easy to believe that you’ve stepped off the hysterical merry-go-round of twenty-first century life and into a parallel dimension. Achieving the simple life is easy when temptations aren’t
necessarily nonexistent but merely incomprehensible.
Still, there’s a lot to be said for his lyrical descriptions of a rich interior life, and that’s what I hope to achieve with my own attempts to eliminate clutter and distraction. I breathe more deeply now that my living room is spare (or at least getting there). I’ve shed and shed and shed — very carefully when it comes to personal possessions, but less discrinimately when it comes to tchotchkes and the like — and with each dusty layer I reveal more peace and tranquility underneath the suffocating cave of excess.
I still have a long way to go, but I’m finding more time to read and write and engage in contemplative thinking, something I’d always avoided, using “I have no time for this” as a pathetic excuse. I have more time to devote to my research and book, so perhaps I can finally finish it after all this time. I have more time to think about my next book, too, and to consider characters and stories and plots and places and all those other wonderful things that the imagination is capable of spinning when it has room to expand.
The next thing on my plate is to collect plain white boxes — like the beautiful Stockholm paper boxes at the Container Store — and use them to organize the thousands and thousands of photos and other souvenirs from the travels that B. and I — both together and apart — have taken over the years. There were the times in Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe, and all over North America, including the Caribbean and Hawai’i. There’s our wedding album (hard to believe, but although we ran a wedding photography business together a few years ago, we’ve yet to get around to putting together our own album) and our honeymoon album. There are the emails and cards that we’ve exchanged from the moment we met thirteen years ago. Lots and lots of memories. It will take years to make all those albums, so in the meantime I must at least organize them into individual boxes, categorized by event and/or place.
And when I’m done, we’ll go out and find more adventures, take more photos, collect more memories. Such is the beauty of living a simple life. It gives you the time and money to enrich it even more.
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{ 2 comments }
Congratulations for cleaning and clearing your space. I walked into my small apartment the other day and thought, "what a dump." Not because the furniture is cheap or in bad taste, but because I had papers (newspapers, magazines, pages of my writing, my groups' writings, etc.) on practically every table and chair I owned. I have since uncluttered two tables. They may be New Yorkers and The New York Times, but now it's either put away neatly or recycle.
Bonjour, Ana, and merci mille for visiting and commenting!
I think you and I have mirror-image apartments! Gosh, I must've donated dozens of boxes of books and magazines the last few weeks. And you know what? I don't even miss them. I've started letting many subscriptions run out, too, without renewals. I feel bad because I'm a writer and believe in the printed word and supporting that industry, but on the other hand, I don't want it to take over my home. Right now I'm just subscribing to things that really mean something to me, like my writing magazines.
Sounds like you're off to a good start already. Doesn't it feel absolutely freeing to rid oneself of all that clutter?
Salut,
Marjorie
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