There’s no one right way to happiness, but only the way that’s right for a particular person—which is why mindfulness matters so much to happiness. To be happier, I have to notice what I’m doing, and why, and how it makes me feel. Research suggests that mindful people tend to be happier, are more likely to feel self-confident and grateful and less likely to feel anxious or depressed, and have heightened self-knowledge. “Cultivating a shrine” made me more mindful of the possessions that were most meaningful to me.
While I was in the midst of this shrine building, I went with Jamie to a work event. Another guest and I struck up a conversation, and when he asked me what I did, I explained a little about the happiness project.
“I can understand about cultivating a shrine,” he nodded. “My father has a crazy kind of shrine to wine—a whole room where he keeps a huge number of bottles after he’s drunk the wine, all arranged on shelves along with his library of wine books, with maps of wine regions of France on the wall.”
“That’s a great shrine,” I said.
“Yes, but do we overvalue possessions? People are important, but not things.” He didn’t sound very convinced.
“People make that argument all the time!” I answered. “But it seems like a false choice. People can be important to you and possessions can be important to you.”
“True.”
“I read a fascinating study about people’s relationships to their possessions, and in particular, what made a thing ‘special.’ What the researchers found was that usually it wasn’t the object itself that was so special, but the important memories or associations invoked by the thing.”
“So it’s not that my father is so attached to that bottle of wine, per se, but the bottle reminds him of a trip to a particular vineyard, or a great meal, or whatever.”
“Exactly.” I suspected I was on the verge of becoming a happiness bore, but I couldn’t stop talking about this research. “An even more interesting aspect of the study is the fact that one subset of people denied the importance of possessions. They insisted that things weren’t important to them, only people were important to them—but, in fact, they turned out to be the most lonely, isolated group. It just doesn’t seem to be true that valuing possessions means you don’t value people.”
Before long, our conversation drifted to other topics, but as soon as Jamie and I were home, I headed to my office to reread that passage from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self.
Some of our respondents were upset by our questions about special objects and told us that they were not materialists, and things mean nothing to them. It is people, not objects that count.… This rejection of the symbolic mediation of things in favor of direct human ties seemed plausible at first, until we began to notice that … [t]hose who were most vocal about prizing friendship over material concerns seemed to be the most lonely and isolated.… Those who have ties to people tend to represent them in concrete objects.
This rang true for me. I certainly used possessions to memorialize important relationships and experiences. A mere accumulation of objects was meaningless, though; a possession was precious only if I made it precious, through my associations.
GO SHELF BY SHELF
“Order is Heaven’s first law,” wrote Alexander Pope, and one thing that has surprised me is the significance of clutter to happiness. While positive-psychology researchers rarely address this topic, it’s a huge subject of discussion in popular culture.
For me, fighting clutter is a never-ending battle; although I’d labored to clear clutter as part of my first happiness project, I was eager to find additional strategies to stop its insidious progress. Inspired by William Morris’s rousing call to “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” I resolved to “Go shelf by shelf,” then drawer by drawer, then closet by closet, to consider each of our possessions. Did one of us use it or love it? Would we replace it if it were broken or lost? If so, was it in the right place? If not, why keep it?
Years ago, I started keeping a list of my Secrets of Adulthood—the large and small lessons I’d mastered as I’d grown up. Recent additions included:
• Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for me.
• It’s enormously helpful, and surprisingly difficult, to grasp the obvious.
• You need new friends and old friends.
• The quickest way to progress from A to B is not to work the hardest.
• It’s easier to prevent pain than to squelch it (literally and figuratively).
• Where you start makes a big difference in where you end up.
• The opposite of a profound truth is also true.
• A change is as good as a rest.
• It’s more important to say something than to say the right thing.
• The best reading is rereading.
One of the most helpful of these Secrets of Adulthood holds that “Outer order contributes to inner calm.” Why is this true? Perhaps it’s the tangible sense of control, or the relief from visual noise, or the release from guilt. In the span of a happy life, having a messy desk or an overflowing closet is clearly trivial, and yet creating order gives a disproportionate boost of energy and cheer. (Of all the resolutions that I’ve proposed, which one do people most often mention that they’ve tried, with great success? The resolution to “Make your bed.”)
This month, the resolution to “Go shelf by shelf” would make me feel calmer, and also make my life easier. Professional organizers estimate that the average American spends almost an hour a day searching for things, and for the average home, according to the Soap and Detergent Association (in a seemingly unself-serving conclusion), clearing clutter would eliminate 40 percent of housework. Nevertheless, procrastination expert Piers Steel points out that clearing cluttered spaces is one of the activities that people most often put off.
I weighed two approaches to my resolution to “Go shelf by shelf.” Should I go systematically shelf by shelf through my apartment, starting at one end, ending at the other, taking a few hours each time? Or should I go shelf by shelf in a more scattershot way, taking advantage of loose bits of time?
My instinct to be methodical was very strong, but in the end, I decided to tackle clutter opportunistically. I didn’t want this to be a onetime exercise, helpful for a brief time, until the clutter crept back in (as it always does). Instead, I wanted to train myself to use this approach for the rest of my life. For that, I’d have to set the bar low.
As I walked around the apartment, I tried to see it with fresh eyes—the slightly panicky way I see it just before guests arrive, or when my parents are coming to visit, or after we’ve returned from a week’s vacation. I noticed the dusty glass of the sconces, the fingerprints on the doorjambs, the broken knob in the bathroom, the empty box of cereal in the fridge (for reasons lost in the mists of time, we store our cereal in the refrigerator).
I’d become a bit of a clutter-clearing nut, so I didn’t expect to find much—I’m the kind of person who makes the bed in a hotel room, even on the morning of checkout—but when I really looked, I found a shocking number of things that had been plunked down in the wrong place, sometimes for years. For instance, four years ago, to listen to a hypnosis tape, I’d pulled out my old-fashioned tape-playing Walkman. After I finished, I absentmindedly set the Walkman on top of some books on a bedroom shelf. And that Walkman was still there, exactly where I’d left it. I saw two clocks with dead batteries, a pile of unread books stacked on the floor in a hallway corner, a mirror leaning against a wall, unhung.
In any serious battle against clutter, I always start at the same place: my clothes closet. Fortunately, my mother was coming to town. I have a blind eye for fashion, but my mother has a beautiful sense of style, and she could decide what looked good. Also, when I like a piece of clothing, I keep it too long; she tells me if my favorite T-shirt belon
gs in the trash.
Hanger by hanger, I tried on practically everything in my closet for my mother. Did it still look good? When was the last time I had worn it? Realistically, would I wear it again?
“I thought these blue pants were uncomfortable, but they’re fine,” I told my mother. “This white shirt—I like it, but I’m worried that I’ll stain it.”
“Wear everything, as much as you can,” she advised. “Wear it out! It’s not doing any good hanging in your closet. And instead of wearing the same few things over and over, try to wear all your clothes.”
Also, as I was straightening up my closet, I noticed that some prime closet real estate was occupied by a few scarves. They were beautiful, but I never wear scarves. Never. “I could put these on a high shelf,” I reasoned, “or, even better, maybe my mother wants the scarves!” And she did. In one stroke, I freed valuable closet space, gave my mother something nice, and relieved myself of the twinge of guilt I felt whenever my glance fell on the neglected scarves.
As I continued to work my way shelf by shelf through our apartment, I adopted several catchphrases to make the shelf-by-shelf exercise more effective.
Clean as I go. When I found stale corn flakes in a silverware drawer, or a clump of toothpaste dried to the medicine-cabinet shelf, I took the time to clean up, instead of making the empty promise “I’ll deal with that later.”
Abandon a project. One very effective way to complete a project is to abandon it. A source of clutter in my apartment, and worse, in my mind, was the uncomfortable presence of unfinished projects. While going shelf by shelf through our toy closet, I spotted a kit for making a miniature mountain scene that Eliza and I had planned to build together. In the store, it had looked fun, but we’d opened the box to find several closely printed pages of confusing instructions. “This looks hard,” I’d said, feeling defeated. “We’ll do it another day.” There it had sat for months, opened but untouched, a reproach. Now, I removed the useful materials, added them to our art supplies, and threw away the box.
Buy what I need. Often, making a purchase just made clutter worse, but then again, sometimes a purchase helped. As an under-buyer, I often delay buying things, and when I do buy, I buy as little as possible. I buy one bottle of contact lens solution at a time. I resist things with highly specific functions, such as a computer carrier or rain boots. Instead of using a ladylike toiletries kit, I reuse a Ziploc bag. (Having an appreciation for well-designed tools doesn’t mean that I buy those tools.) I often decide “Maybe we don’t really need this” or “I’ll buy this some other time.” I suffer needless annoyance because I don’t have what I need or I’m using something that isn’t exactly suitable. By contrast, over-buyers tell themselves, “We can probably use that.”
“This might come in handy, someday.”
“Why not get one in every color?” Over-buyers suffer needless annoyance because of the time, money, energy, and space necessary to support their over-buying.
I finally prodded myself to buy a new toaster.
Ignore feng shui. People often told me, “You should study feng shui!”—the Chinese practice of positioning buildings and possessions to boost energy, prosperity, and harmony. While some feng shui teaching is sensible (throw out dead plants, toss an ex-boyfriend’s photograph), I wasn’t persuaded by its more doctrinal suggestions. To me, putting lots of purple in my apartment’s Prosperity area seems less constructive than other changes I might make with the same time and effort. But I understand the appeal of feng shui. Like Manichaeism, karma, and the Law of Attraction—true or not, it feels true.
Clear surfaces. During a visit to my sister, Elizabeth, in Los Angeles, as I was helping her clear clutter (I didn’t suggest it; she did), I noticed that while her kitchen counters were crowded, her dining room table was beautifully bare, in a textbook illustration of the principle that clear areas stay clear, and messy areas become messier. Surfaces should be used for activities, not storage, I instructed myself, and I cleared surfaces wherever possible.
Think about appearances. I wanted my apartment to be less cluttered, and also to look less cluttered. As our messy piles of T-shirts showed, I’d never gained the knack for folding items properly. (I’ve also never learned to tie my shoes the right way but still use the babyish “bunny ears” method, to my mother’s chagrin and my daughters’ glee.) One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “It’s okay to ask for help,” and I knew just whom to ask for a folding tutorial. A friend had worked in a children’s clothing store during high school, and I’d heard her boast about what a good folder she was.
“Hey,” I told her the next time we met, “I need a lesson in folding.” I pulled out the white T-shirt I’d brought with me.
“Why?” she laughed. “You actually brought a T-shirt?” She held it up and eyed it critically. “Hmm, this one isn’t good for folding, the fabric is too thin. It’s not going to hold its shape nicely.”
“Well, just show me what to do. I’m no good at it.”
She held up the T-shirt, with the front facing her, then flipped the width of the left sleeve toward the center, then the right sleeve. Next, holding both sides flipped in, she lay the T-shirt down and folded it in half. She was fast.
“Practice a bunch of times,” she said, “it’ll get easy.”
I practiced, I folded all my T-shirts, and I got a real charge from seeing the smooth, flat piles. There’s a surgeon’s pleasure that comes from sheer order, from putting an object back neatly in its precise place. For the same reason, in the kitchen, instead of keeping measuring cups and spoons loose among the coffee mugs, I gathered them in a plastic basket. It was really no easier to find them, and yet the appearance of greater orderliness was satisfying.
Beware of problem objects. I also looked for patterns of likely clutter, so I’d more quickly spot and address problem items such as:
• “Cute” kitchen objects that didn’t work very well.
• Broken things. Why was it so hard to admit that something was broken—say, that defective toaster, Eliza’s frog clock, our three crippled umbrellas, the cracked vase? Ditto with tech gadgets that we’d replaced yet, inexplicably, also kept the broken or outmoded version.
• Things that seemed potentially useful but somehow never did get used, such as an oversized water bottle or complicated corkscrew. Or duplicates—how many spare glass salsa jars can we use?
• Things I wanted to “save.” Often, this made no sense. What’s the point of fancy bath gel if it never leaves the container? Why was I “saving” those colorful tin trays from my grandmother? A friend confided ruefully, “I saved my expensive truffle oil so long that it spoiled in the bottle.” Spend out, use things up.
• Beautiful, useless things. Eliza and Eleanor each had a set of china baby dishes. Lovely, but what to do with them? (I never did come up with a satisfactory solution and just stuck them at the bottom of a little-used drawer.)
• Things meant to encourage me to undertake disagreeable activities. Years ago, I bought a digital recorder, because I hoped that if I had the proper tools, I’d do interviews. But I didn’t really want to do interviews, and having the recorder didn’t change that fact. I have several friends who were convinced by the same faulty logic to acquire expensive exercise equipment.
• Things that were neatly put away. No matter how nicely organized, useless things make clutter. In a way, we were lucky not to have much storage space. No attic, no storage unit, no utility room, just part of a storage bin in our building’s basement where we stored holiday decorations, spare air-conditioner filters, and some plastic children’s chairs. No garage, either, which many people use for storage; in fact, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 25 percent of people who have two-car garages don’t park their cars inside.
• Items introduced under the Grandparent Privilege. Just as the grandparents set their own rules for bedtime, snacks, and TV watching, they get to buy whatever they want for Eliza and Eleanor. While my mother-in-law would nev
er buy novelty items for herself, through the girls, she indulges her secret love for solar-powered prisms, sets of miniature colored pencils, and the like. These things were fun, but had to be rounded up regularly lest they spread into every corner.
• Things we never used. It was time to give away the rice cooker I gave Jamie for his last birthday. Alas. He loves to cook, and I’d thought it was a brilliant idea for a present, but he never used it.
As I went shelf by shelf through the apartment, however, I struggled most to decide what to do with things we no longer needed but had once been precious or much-used. As philosopher Adam Smith explained:
We conceive … a sort of gratitude for those inanimated objects, which have been the causes of great, or frequent pleasure to us. The sailor, who, as soon as he got ashore, should mend his fire with the plank upon which he had just escaped from a shipwreck, would seem to be guilty of an unnatural action. We should expect that he would rather preserve it with care and affection, as a monument that was, in some measure, dear to him.
That explained the mystery of why I’d kept my old laptops. Like the rescued sailor, I found it hard to part with the four outdated machines that had served me so loyally and traveled everywhere with me. But now it was time to say farewell. I took a photograph of the laptops, to remember them by, and Eliza took them to school for an electronics-recycling drive.
I also felt a powerful connection to things I associated with my daughters. Occasionally, getting rid of a childhood relic was a joy—I took a picture of a smiling Eleanor next to the diaper pail on the day we threw it away forever—but more often, I felt a sense of loss. Eliza didn’t care about Mr. Chicken anymore, and Eleanor would never use her beloved purple sippy cup again. Both girls had outgrown the mermaid and Dorothy costumes that had seen so much wear. “Years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another,” wrote Horace with piercing truth. But what should I do with these objects?
I’d better decide what to keep, now. The longer I held on to things, the more sentiment would attach to them, and I couldn’t keep every toy or book my girls had ever loved. And not only toys and books. On one shelf-by-shelf expedition, I unearthed a tube of Baby Orajel left over from teething days, and I found it surprisingly hard to toss this artifact of babyhood.