Leading a simple life, with all the romantic and idealistic connotations that it inspires, is a passion of mine. This passion, unfortunately, often comes into conflict with other passions I've nurtured: technology, media, books, and many other forms of entertainment.
As the years went by, I slowly collected an impressive array of entertainment options. It would probably take me a lifetime to consume all of it!
This brought an incredible amount of clutter to my life, and the weight of it all was becoming unbearable. My dreams of simplicity took space in the back burner of my mind, slowly simmering and nagging me as the years went by.
A Book & The Beginning of an Experiment
And then I bought a book by Marie Kondo on the Japanese Art of Decluttering & Organizing that everyone in my office was talking about. Hmm...I thought, why not? And in capitalistic irony, I sought my solution to decluttering from media by buying one more book.
As I read the book, I found it peculiar. Kondo is quite the odd cookie, to put it mildly. Her KonMari method (you guessed it, the method is named after her last and first name) seemed to make sense however, and talking it over with my wife, we decided to plunge into a scary and yet exciting experiment. Let's try it out, we said, armed with book in hand, fear and determination.
Day 1: Clothes
The book recommends starting with clothes. We gathered all of our clothes into the living room. Every. Single. Item.
As we gathered our clothes from different rooms in our home, the disturbing explosion in our living room was convicting. It looked as if a GAP suddenly imploded in our living space. How did we get this amount of clothes? our shocked eyes seemed to express.
Then, we proceeded by grabbing each item, holding it, and asking ourselves, "does this spark joy?" We found the simple question to be powerful, and as we went trough every single item, we found that we owned a lot of clothes that we didn't even like.
After two hours of rummaging through our beloved wearables, we managed to purge a third to a half of our clothes. Some of them we got rid of, the gently used ones (sans underwear) we donated.
Day 2: Books
Gosh darn it to heck! I knew the day would come when I needed to go through the pride and glory of my media collection: books.
My dear and beloved books, how could I get rid of you? You have brought so much inspiration, laughter, and tears to my life. And yet I look at y'all with apprehension at the thought of moving again: the unbearably heavy boxes we put you in did no favors to my back and my manhood!
As this heart-wrenching day started, we again gathered EVERY SINGLE BOOK into the living room. The process itself took longer than we thought. We struggled to find an open space to put ALL the books on, and even our chairs and couch had to do double duty.
As I asked myself the question, "does this book spark joy?" it became more and more difficult to answer. Who cares?! I thought I want to read it someday!
Slowly, however, my wife and I were able to get rid of a third of our books. We filled 5 heavy boxes of them, and yet we still managed to keep a sizable collection to ourselves.
The book purge wasn't as successful, but we felt pretty good about the end result: an organized library by category, and an awareness of so many good books we really want to read, but that were forgotten.
We Still Have Much More to Do
We are still not done with our experiment. We are very pleased, however, at the changes this has brought us.
I have been reflecting on the effect the endless choices of media and entertainment that I have. I believe this ultimately has a negative effect on our spirituality, and it can actually detract from it.
I have been convicted in my prayers about how much stuff I actually own, and I am more aware now of how those things wear me down and bring unnecessary stress to my life.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post this Friday about how too many options distract us from the inner life and our walk with God, and how a commitment to simplicity will aid us in this journey of faith.
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