possessions

Do You “Respect Your Possessions”?

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Pile of garbageYet another blog post generated from a Gretchen Rubin idea. (I guess at some point I’ll have to start paying her a commission.) She had an interview this week with Marie Kondo, the incredibly successful organizer/declutterer who has now written a second book, Spark Joy. I just went online and downloaded the audiobook from the library, so expect to hear about my going on another ninja clearing-out raid in the days to come, the same thing that happened when I read Kondo’s first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

 

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The Tyranny of Possessions

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PictureSalisbury House, EnglandI was reminded of this principle awhile ago when I was in an enormous house for a meeting.You walked into the front door and there you were in a foyer with one staircase curving down into a family room with a pool table and a fountain in the floor and the other curving up to the main level with another fountain, this time as a sheet of water flowing down a glass wall. I sat in the beautiful living room facing a fireplace with some kind of fancy poured-concrete mantel and huge shelves on either side of it going all the way up to the very high ceiling, with decorative objects and photographs. All I could think was, ‘How on earth do you get up to that top shelf to dust?” It wouldn’t be a matter of a stepstool; more of a stepladder. Maybe even a crane.

Before I go on, I do want to make it clear (not that anyone reading this has the faintest idea whom I’m talking about) that I’m not in any way criticizing the people who own the house. I have no idea how they use it or what their rationale was for buying it. I really enjoyed being there, and I came home fired up with the intention of keeping my own house a little more pristine.

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How to Grow a Mustache

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Mr. Money Mustache:  Financial Freedom through Badassity, mrmoneymustache.com.  by Pete, no last name given.  No, that’s not him in the picture.

Yet again this week there’s a blog instead of a book.  I promise that next week I’ll post about a book.  (I’m in the midst of reading it right now, in between my stints on the MMM website.)  And, another yet again, I don’t know how I ran across this site.  The power of Google, I guess.  Mr. Mustache addresses the age-old question of whether or not money can buy happiness.  The answer is:  only if you use the money to buy freedom instead of things.  (And why a mustache?  Well, guess you’ll have to check out the blog for yourself.)

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From the Sublime to the Mundane

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Yesterday I took on the Big Question of free will vs. fate.  Today I’m talking about cleaning out my Sonicare toothbrush.  No one can accuse me of being in a rut!

Here’s the thing:  The inside of the head  of this appliance gets gunked up with this black stuff, toothpaste residue, and it drives me crazy. ( Yes, I do rinse out the bristles.  It still happens.)  So I periodically spend 10 minutes or so cleaning it out with q-tips, but at some point it’s just hopeless.  Recently I replaced the head, as you’re supposed to do every three months (but who does that, really?) and I determined that I was going to keep it clean.  So now, every time I use it, twice a day. I unscrew the top from the base, rinse it out inside, and shake out the water before screwing it back on.  Takes about 30 seconds, tops.  So far it seems to be staying clean.  No more black gunk.  A good illustration, once again, of the principle that it’s easier to keep up than it is to catch up.  (I will spare you the description of how awful my sink stopper gets because I let hairs go down the drain instead of cleaning them out.  You don’t want to know about that, believe me.)

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Tool Costs

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I seem to be on a tool tear, as it were.  Over the past several weeks I’ve written about using Scrivener as a writing tool, my little laptop as a bill-paying tool, and habits as tools to help lend structure to my life.  But . . . I’ve also emphasized that tools don’t do the work for us.  So I’m dedicating this post to two non-tool-users, Woody Allen and K. Lee Scott

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The Strategy of Convenience

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Another habits principle is that you’re more likely to do what’s convenient and less likely to do what isn’t.  It struck me just a day or two ago that I had a tool that I loved, that was extremely convenient and which I could use more:  my darling little laptop.  You can see in the picture how small it is.  [Note: this is a stock image; as with so many other pictures, this one was lost in the website move. And now, as I re-do this post, that little laptop is long gone–I think I’m o the third one now.] I carry it around with me from room to room just as some people carry around their smartphones.  [Again, a further note: I certainly now have a smartphone!]  A couple of days ago I sat down to pay some bills and realized that I hadn’t balanced the checkbook for some time.  I’ve still been using a paper check register to do this, and I thought, Why don’t I use my laptop?  I googled “virtual check register” and found something called “checkbook.com.”  I also used the strategy of the “clean slate,” another Gretchen Rubin idea.  I didn’t bother with going back and checking every transaction since the last time I did the balancing act; I don’t think I’ve ever found a mistake on the bank’s side, so what was the point?  The important thing is for me to have some kind of backup information, although I guess it would be fine just to rely on the bank’s online statement.  I may re-think the issue in the future, but at least for now I can just enter items online and see the balance computed for me.  I’m also going to go ahead and start actually paying the bills online, something I’ve resisted doing for some reason.  Why should I go through the inconvenient process of writing out checks, entering them in the register, putting the check and the payment slip in an envelope, hunting up a stamp and a return address label, and then mailing them?  Hmmm.  As soon as I get finished writing this post I’ll go to the bank website, pay off yesterday’s credit card charges and pay the two bills I have right now.  One is a medical bill that will have to be paid by check, but the other is the monthly phone/internet charge, so I can set up online bill pay for that.  (I realize that the preceding may sound like I’m still using a quill pen and paying bills with bags of coins, but I’m really trying to become more hip and happening!)  I’ve been wanting to establish the habit of keeping up with our finances on a daily or semi-daily basis; the use of a convenient, familiar, well-liked tool will help me do that.

Where’s My Reward?

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I’m concentrating right now on building happiness by establishing good habits within the limits of my character.  This emphasis has grown out of Gretchen Rubin’s new book that I wrote about yesterday.  I’ve been sharing my struggles to put accountability structures in place that will work with my obliger tendency, but I’m realizing that for some habits I’m just going to have to use some other prod or prods.  I’ll be writing about these ideas over the next posts.  I love putting my mind to a problem and finding a solution once I realize that there is a problem.

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Dear me, let us be elegant or die!

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You can’t accuse me of a boring consistency in the books I write about on this blog.  Last week’s book had a gun on the cover and talked about the logistics of killing someone; this week’s tells you why you should dress, eat and indeed live like an elegant Frenchwoman.  (Note to guys reading this:  the rest of February’s books are also going to be pretty female-centric.  Fine with me if you want to read the blogs or the books themselves.  I’m just a-sayin’.)

I can’t quite remember why or how I ran across this book, although I do know that I actually bought it, a rarity for me.  It was enjoyable and, I thought at the time, pretty lightweight, one of many memoirs about Americans going to France and finding out what they’ve been missing.  

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Clear the Decks!

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Now folks, this is a somewhat weird book.  I highly recommend it or I wouldn’t include it here, but there’s no question that Ms. Kondo has her own idiosyncratic view of how you should treat your possessions.  Being one of her clients must be quite an experience, as she insists that things be done her way or else.  (She has a three-month waiting list for her personal consultations, so people don’t seem to mind.) She has two central ideas.  The first is the one that’s the most problematic for me:  that you must do the tidying up of your surroundings all at once.  If you do it gradually, she says, you’ll never finish.  In an ideal world she’d probably be right, but most of us can’t really take a whole weekend to throw out stuff.  If we have to do it that way, we’ll never do it at all.

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