Stay of Execution: Good Riddance

Housemate and I are undertaking a serious decluttering project. We're devoting a pretty serious hunk of time to it each week for the month of January, and are going to do the entire house, from tip to tip. Because she's an art student, and because we're both kind of groovy, we're not just going to throw a lot of junk into bags and send some to the trash and some to Goodwill. We're trying to be intentional about the project, and to push one another to let go of a lot more of the things we hold onto than feels comfortable. We've given a lot of thought both to the intentions behind the project, the documentation of the project, and the ways to include and connect with other people through the project.

The underlying principle is not just decluttering, but trying to fight our own grasping tendencies, and trying to encourage generosity and simplicity. I keep writing 'abundance' and 'thrift', and then thinking, "no, that doesn't make sense -- those are opposites" and deleting them. But they're not opposites, actually. I think that when you hang onto things, it can sometimes be thrift, and it can sometimes be panic, desperation, or graspingness. When you feel a sense of abundance, you don't need to own things, because you can borrow or obtain what you need without having to stow it or hang onto it. So in some ways letting go of things we've been hanging onto just in case is recognizing the abundance of the world. And in other cases hanging onto things is actually thrift.

We're going to photograph all the things we're giving away, each day, and make a big spreadsheet of each room. We may make it into a blog, actually, although it might be kind of a dull one. We're also going to document those things we're keeping. As we do so, we're going to try to articulate some principles behind the things in our life that matter to us. I expect usefulness will be one, sentimental value another. And there are some things that we won't expect.

(I was de-decorating the Christmas tree, for example, and took off the fuschia pink feather boa that was strung along the tree like a garland. I pondered the pink boa and wondered what its fate would be in the Good Riddance Project. I immediately thought of the arguments for keeping it. "A hot pink boa is a good thing to have around," I thought. "There are times when a hot pink boa is just the thing to change the mood of a room." And then, "I like being the kind of person, with the kind of house, that can come up with something frivolous and funny like a pink boa at just the right moment to make a group of people smile." Interesting. But of course, do I really need this pink boa? Probably not. We'll see what becomes of it.)

So when we identify the things we don't want to hang onto anymore (including those things we really WANT to hang onto, but acknowledge that we don't need, really), we're going to divide them up into categories. There will be trash, but probably not too much. There will be the Goodwill things. And then there will be things too nice, or too meaningful, for Goodwill. We talked about selling them but we decided that since generosity and abundance are intended to be a part of this project, we will have an Elf Day or two, where we wrap these items and give them as gifts to selected recipients. Depending on how many such items there are, we also talked about inviting friends over for a big Yankee Swap, only asking our friends to bring food to share instead of gifts. Then we'd have a big potluck feast, and go around the room just like a Yankee Swap, and all our friends would take away our precious, but no longer needed, objects.

One piece of this is an enormous closet purge. We've invited two of our most stylish girlfriends over for dinner on a specific night, and we're going to ask them to help us by giving the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down on all of the clothing we wish to keep. We've done this once before, and our advisor was wonderfully helpful. "You can wear that, but you can't," she would say about something we'd formerly shared. Or, "That skirt is acceptable, but ONLY if you wear it with boots and a very tight top -- otherwise it's frumpy." It was wonderful. Our wardrobe advisor actually left with a few items of our clothing, we gave some of it to other friends, and we had this great certainty about dressing -- we knew that what remained in our closet looked really great, or, if not, what it needed to look terrific.

I'm sure there will be more to report as the project gets underway. I know I'm going to be getting rid of a ton of books, and maybe I'll offer to mail them to interested blog readers if we can find a way to make it postage-neutral to me. (Paypal? Sounds kind of hard.... ) We'll see. Perhaps even a hot pink feather boa will be available....

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Stay of Execution

In which Scheherazade postpones the inevitable with tales of law and life....

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