Be Careful with the De-Cluttering!

At this point, many of us have been locked in our homes for so long that we’ve had a chance to clutter and are now thinking that the best option for our weekend amusement is to de-clutter again.  All over the web we’re bombarded with articles about removing any imaginable excess from our lives.

Your best use of time may be to go for a walk instead of continuing to winnow your possessions!

Our sensory apparatus to get stressed out when too much visual information confronts us (this is the technical term that psychologists use instead of “clutter,” mainly to keep other professionals from feeling too confident or important)—but too little can be just as jarring to our wellbeing.

When we were a young species, and our sensory systems were developing we were not living in pristine and empty white boxes.  Our brains took their current form in outdoor spaces with moderate visual complexity (as described here), so that’s where we feel best today.

If you’ve gotten rid of all the paintings from your nephew you’ve been accumulating since he was 4 (and now he’s 30), all of the pizza delivery flyers, paintings of ugly purple cows you inherited from Aunt Edna (donating them to charity after you checked to make sure that they weren’t worth a fortune), etc., in your home stop.  When you have pared the visuals in your world to a painting/wall hanging/etc. or two on each wall (leaving lots of white space on those walls, not covered by furniture), and a couple of table top items (again, with oodles of space around them) and maybe a few plants/hat racks/sculptures etc. standing on your floor, stop.  All the items in your curated displays are carrying on a conversation with you and anyone who lives with or visits you.

You need items around you that remind you what you value about yourself and the life that you live (or are trying to live) and send that same important information to anyone who enters your home.  Spaces that don’t communicate this vital information are spaces that fail to please their owners or anyone who visits them.

Too stark is too bad.  Now, go quick as you can, to the charity shop and buy back that purple cow painting, since you’ve proved you are proud to be a free-thinker, just as Aunt Edna taught you to be.