Friday, January 09, 2015

Althouse Posts on Decluttering (UPDATED)

Here.

I have a relatively small office at the firm.  Each business day at the office, I spend at least an hour (or should) doing what I call a "sweep."  By that I mean looking at every piece of paper that has wandered out of place and either discarding it, scanning it, posting the subject matter on a to-do list, or otherwise putting it where it needs to go, where God intended for it to be.  Cf. 1 Cor. 14:33.

Now and then, I walk into the office the morning after a complete de-clutter (usually on a Monday, after I've spent the better part of my day Saturday doing the sweep, requiring the balance of that day to be spent in a long nap) and I feel a sense a joy.  I think that is what first walking (floating? rematerializing?) into heaven must feel like.  (Or maybe heaven is simply having the time and energy to declutter.)

This is not exactly the same thing that Althouse posts about, but it is very close.

We are always misplacing things at home, and often they cannot be found for years.  There is an entire set of Barth's Church Dogmatics that disappeared amongst the clutter several years ago.  We still don't know where it is.  We refer to where it went as "the sock hole."  There are lots of things we would like to retrieve from that place, but we can't find the portal.  When the kids arrive after we've gone to heaven, they will finally unpile everything - like the lady in the Althouse link . They will discover the entrance to that Lewis Carroll kind of place, and they will have a good laugh.

UPDATE:

I had to get back into this post because the link didn't work to the Althouse blog.  It is fixed, but I read the blog again.  You will see that Ann reviews the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and includes a YouTube video of its author, Marie Kondo, discussing the book.  Ms. Kondo advises keeping only the things that give you joy.  Hmm.  Well, Carol is certainly on the list.  Now what else?

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