How Many Objects Do We Own?

Did you hear about the Belgian photographer who decided to photograph every item in her home? Yep, turns out Barbara Iweins has 12,795 items in her home. And that includes everything... every little single piece of Playmobile to every single fork and every single tweezer or blister pack of pills or screw or nail.

That seems like an awful lot of stuff. And yet... when I look at that number, I think... "Heck, I probably have at least that many nails and screws... just in nails and screws!" I'm a bit concerned that we would blow that number out of the water!

Some of the many items that Barbara Iweins catalogued in her home

What Barbara also learned was... only 1% of those objects are actually important (128 objects). The rest of it... she could get rid of easily. Now that number... I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around. I mean, yes, I could easily get rid of every screw and nail and thing-a-ma-jig as they are not sentimental in the last. And not really "important"... until I need one. Which I often do. 

When I first read the 1% statement... I read it is they only "need" 1% of the things. But that's not the case... it's only that 1% of the things are "important". And many of those things are sentimental to Barbara and her children, like a Dahlia preserved in a jar of formalin.

And so I think... if we had to pack and move and could only keep the things that were "important" to us... what would we pack? Knowing that we could always get more nails and screws somewhere else. I think we could come in under, or at the 128 item limit. Maybe.

North American Reality

But then... I had a bit of a wake-up call... You see... this was a Belgian woman living in a typical European home. She was appalled at the 12,795 things that she owned... and that took her 4 years to photograph.

Guess what... the average American home contains around 300,000 things. Yep... that is almost 25 TIMES as much as our Belgian friend. The average American home has the contents of 25 Belgian homes in it.

On the bright side, that means I should be able to keep 300 items of importance to me but... that's not the point of this...

300,000 things. How is that even possible? Although... with my stash of screws and nails and thing-a-ma-bobs... I do see how we might.. maybe... come close to that. For sure if we counted every single puzzle piece as a separate item! And let's not even get into paperclips. We have the space in our large North American homes so it's easy to buy in bulk and stock up on paperclips and staples and sticky notes and nails and screws.

I had this vague idea that... "oooh... maybe I should photograph everything that we own!"... Yeah. No. I mean, Barbara is a photographer and everything she took a photo of was very nicely staged, which must have taken a fair bit of time. I wouldn't do that but... it's a very different thing to photograph 300,000 objects. Nope. Not doing it. And besides... that's the average American home... what if we have more!?

So you will NOT be reading a blog a year or two (or 10) hence when I produce 300,000 photographs of our possessions. Not doing it. It would be too scary.

Could we get by with less things? Undoubtedly. We have gone through decluttering purges every once in a while and it is always (a) amazing how much we can let go of and (b) amazing how much stuff we still have! Sometimes ignorance is, really, bliss.

More Reading

Barbara Iweins site - Where you can see her Katalog of items

I Wish we had a Garage

In all of the houses in which I have lived... I've never had an enclosed garage. Carports yes. Communal underground parking yes. But never an actual enclosed, just for me, garage.

I walk the streets in our neighbourhood many mornings and I see all of these garages and I wonder... what is inside?

A car parked out of the rain and snow?

Maybe a super organized workbench area along the side of the garage. 

A place to park the bicycle.

And perhaps some storage system along the ceiling. Because that's what I would have, in my ideal house, in an ideal garage. My dream garage...

Tuning into my Yammering Silent To-Do List

 Do you have a silent to-do list? Have you even heard of one? I hadn't until I read Fumio Sasaki's book, Good-bye Things. Here's the gist of it in a nutshell. The silent to-do list is all of those things that are NOT on your to-do list but that still impinge on your consciousness as you walk by them. The item itself is silent... but the voice in your head is not!

• The bookshelf that needs dusting - "Shoot, gotta dust that. What if guests come over (well... not during Covid obviously) and think I'm a complete house slob!"
• The little tchotchke sitting on the counter that needs a glue job - "Right, gotta look for the Crazy Glue. I don't think we have Crazy Glue. Gotta remember to buy Crazy Glue." 
• The frayed tea towel - "Gotta fix that or toss that. But we don't have a sewing machine. But it's still a useful towel except for that fraying hem."
• The books that haven't been read - "No time... but one day! Just not today. It's too thick for today. Maybe I should let it go? No, I paid good money for that book. Maybe I'll read it tomorrow."
• The messy desk that needs organizing - "Not right now... maybe tomorrow."
• The email in the Inbox that needs a reply - "Ooohhh... still don't know what to say, will wait till inspiration strikes..."
• Those family tree documents that need to get processed and entered into the tree - "One of these days... when I have time..."
  
• And on and on it goes.

I don't know about you, but I have dozens... maybe hundreds of these little silent to-do list items pinging off me over single day. And that's on top of everything that's on my regular to-do list, the big items. And, I have to say, all that pinging, and the continual batting away of things in my head, is exhausting... and overwhelming.

Now, Sasaki says the solution is... wait for it... less things. Which makes sense. Less things means less pinging and less activity in my head. If the bookshelf didn't have so many tchotchkes on it, it would be easier to dust. If we didn't have that little tchotchke in the first place, it wouldn't need repair! Although... one still needs tea towels... and books... and documents. But there are obviously work-arounds to all of those things. Do we really need to save every document and receipt? Can they be tossed or just scanned and then tossed? And books... oh books are a whole other thing... requiring a whole separate blog post.

Suffice to say, Sasaki's little piece has opened my eyes to the things that are looking at me with pleading, mournful, regretful eyes. The things that I need to take care of... and what I'm beginning to realize is that... some of those things... I don't want to be responsible for them anymore. They weigh me down and I've only got so much energy and enthusiasm for care-taking. I am not, after all, a museum curator!

Here's an example... we have a whole slew of vases that my partner loves to fill up with various flowers from the garden. Some of those vases are ones that I picked up on travels and, unfortunately, one of those got broken. I had had it for 20 years and I was sad and angry that it got broken. But, I worked through that fairly quickly by acknowledging my emotions. After all, it's only a vase. It's only stuff. But I'm one of those people who has a fairly strong emotional attachment to some of that stuff (MY stuff). Some of my stuff contains memories and there are so many emotions attached to those memories. I don't want to lose the stuff because I'm afraid that I will lose the memory that goes with it.

After the broken vase episode, I went through the vase cupboard and pulled out some of my favourite ones and put them on the bookshelf in my office. "There! Now they won't get used and won't get broken." They've been sitting there for months now, cluttering up the bookshelf (that needs dusting) and mutely staring at me every time I look at them. Because, really, they are vases and their purpose is to hold flowers, not to clutter up a bookshelf, even if they are safe there. Sigh... So I put them back into the vase cupboard. Que sera sera. Nothing lasts forever and it's much lighter on the bookshelf now without those little vases nagging at me. Now, there's just some unread books... nagging at me...

I know that David Allen's Getting Things Done method suggests taking a stack of papers (recycled of course - and maybe cut into eights) and writing down every loose end, every incomplete task, every thing that needs doing on a separate piece of paper. You then take each piece of paper and decide on the next actionable step (small step) for that particular to-do item and then enter it into your to-do list or task manager or whatever. It's a fairly time intensive process and I've only ever done it once, but I hang onto bits and pieces of the system. I think, now that I know about the silent to-do list, I would likely have 100s of items on those little pieces of paper. A tad overwhelming but... if the yammering silent items actually got captured and processed onto a to-do list... maybe they wouldn't yammer so much. Or my mind wouldn't yammer so much.

And perhaps the real question isn't... when/how am I going to get this thing done... but rather, does this thing even really need to get done?

Does this massive book really need to get read? Or can I just let it go? But I might read it someday! Really?? Ya think? Well... maybe not. But I paid good money for it! So that's a good reason to keep it hogging space on the bookshelf and taking up space in your yammering mind? Sigh... maybe not. Perhaps I could sell them on Kijiji or Ebay? Oh, for Pete's sake! Think about it... do you really want to put that much effort into a book that might get you $10? Sigh... maybe not...

I don't think I'm quite ready to follow in Sasaki's footsteps, at least not to the extremes that he went to... but, I am moving in the direction of letting more things go. It can be done. If only to quite the yammering in my head!

Surrounded by Stuff

The stuff in my office got to me in mid-December. Everywhere I looked, there was just stuff and more stuff. I had had enough and started a decluttering purge.

I do this every once in a while when the decluttering bug bites me. Or when the stuff just seems like too much. Or when I watch a bit of a Hoarding: Buried Alive episode. Or after reading a book like Fumio Sasaki's book, Goodbye Things.

Lest you think I am a slob or a hoarder, I am not. I come from a long line of super-organized Germans who, while they might keep old jars and bits of string (because... you never know!), keep them in super-organized fashion. Our house was always neat and tidy growing up, even in the closets and cupboards. Everything had a home and we all knew where things went.

Now, this is not a problem when you live in a 2000 sq ft house, and we had a lot of space for stuff when I was growing up. There was a whole massive side of one cupboard totally devoted to gift wrapping - paper, bows, ribbons, tags, stuffing. It was all there. Super handy, super efficient and super organized. If you have the space...

Today, my partner and I live in the upper half of a typical BC box house and we have about 1000 sq ft (maybe a bit less cause that's the outside measurements and doesn't include the square footage devoted to walls and what-not). We have three bedrooms, one a half baths, a living room and a kitchen/dining room. Oh, and three lovely closets in the hallway. It's a nice little house but, honestly, I've lived in apartments that are about the same size. So, it's not like we have a tonne of space. I've added extra shelves in all the closets because there is always so much wasted space up top. And we use all of that space with a vengeance.

But... it's a lot of stuff. Still. Even after moving from an 1800 sq ft condo in Calgary when we came here. We did a lot of downsizing over the years, even here on the Island. Letting go of furniture and stuff. Do we really need all this stuff? What is it all anyways?

And so I go on a little scan through my closet and cupboards in my office and... quickly realize that a lot of it has sentimental value. Little stones that I've picked up along the way. Vases that look sooo cute. Tchotchkes from here and there. Trip souvenirs. Childhood books. A little vase from my grandmother, a gift from a friend. A crystal bowl from my other grandmother. Every item seems to have a memory and an emotion and a person attached to it. I can't let them go!

But, when I sit down with my partner and go through her things, I could easily let go of all of her stuff. Of course I could, I don't have the emotions and memories attached to those objects. They are just things to me and I have no attachment to them.

When I come back to my things, I sit in front of them with a perplexed frown. Why? Why do these objects hold so much attachment? And I realize... with a bit of a gulp... that I really am not all that different from those folk on the hoarding shows. I want to hang onto all of these things because of the emotions that they bring up. Whether it's joy or security or nostalgia. Or even fear. If I let go of this thing... I might need it one day! Better keep it. No matter that I haven't needed it in the lasts ten years. Nope... as soon as I let it go, Murphy's Law kicks in and I'll be needing it.

Like this. My old pair of headphones that I use at the computer were getting pretty ratty. The padding on the ear covers was deteriorating and the plastic was flaking onto the side of my face every time I put them on. So I bought a new pair. Beautiful new headphones. But then I looked at the old pair and thought... They still work just fine. Maybe I should keep them just in case something goes wrong with the new pair? So I did... for months. Crazy, no? But I happy to report that those headphones are now in the electronics recycling container, ready to go to the depot. Although... I still have an old, stained mouse pad in the cupboard... and a spare mouse... just in case the current ones die. Sigh...

And so it went... all through the latter half of December. Some things went to the thrift store. Somethings went into recycling, others into the shredder and still others got scanned first. A bunch of things got listed on Kijiji. If they sell, great. If not, off to the thrift store they go. And some things got set aside for my niece and sister... but only after checking with them first! Some things (like cute rocks and driftwood pieces) went out into the yard to decorate the fairy garden. And... a few things ended up in the garbage, but not too much.

I feel lighter, as if I can breathe and move.

Our ultimate goal, once everything settles down again (if it ever does), is to travel more. Maybe sell the house and become digital nomads. Not sure yet... but if that is our goal... all of this stuff is a big barrier to that goal. We went on a one year sabbatical a few years ago, sold the condo and put everything into storage. It was a pricey hassle, let me tell you. Not planning on doing that the second time around.

I'd rather do the decluttering slowly over time, not in one big fell swoop at the end. And, sometimes, I take pictures of the things I am releasing back into the world. Just in case I want to look at them again. You never know... and digital pictures don't take up any physical space... right?

Don't even get me started on digital decluttering. Ugh!!

Credits - desk image from Lisa Fotios from Pexels