December Decluttering Reads
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December is my month to declutter. I’ve never really been one to “spring clean” but I’ve spent the last several months becoming more and more dissatisfied with how much stuff we have.
Enter decluttering.
With that in mind, I found some books on minimalism and decluttering that I’d like to share with you today. I’ve read two of these three, and am starting the third very soon.
Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism, by Fumio Sasaki
I started reading this book through Kindle Unlimited with a skeptical mindset. Sasaki talks about how few things we really need, but his style of minimalism is not something I could practice. The biggest things I remember from this book:
- Don’t stock up on things. When you run out, go buy more. This one is tough to swallow in the age of Costco and materialism, and I just can’t bring myself to do this for everything. Certainly, for some things, it makes sense not to keep a huge stockpile — because it takes up space.
- It’s okay to take pictures of things before getting rid of them — and I’ve already done this with a few shirts that hold sentimental memories, yet I would never wear again.
Sasaki lives an extreme minimalistic life, which is definitely not for everyone, and not for me and my family. But there are ideas which we can adapt and modify to suit our needs.
If you want a glimpse into the art of extreme Japanese minimalism (and read about a guy who sleeps on a mat, rolls it up when he wakes, and does his cleaning on his way out the door) this book is a good pick.
Minimalist Living, by Genevieve Parker Hill
Hill became a minimalist by force after a fire burned down her parents’ house while she was abroad. Subsequently, she felt this interesting lifting of pressure from her shoulders that came from not having as many things anymore — all the clutter had gone up in flames.
Unfortunately, so did a lot of memories that she would rather have kept, but she uses the fire as a way to describe people who purge their belongings all at once — blazers.
According to Hill, there are two types of people: collectors and purgers. And when it comes to minimizing, those types of people are either gazers or blazers. It’s okay to be either, and I’m a mix of the two depending on the object of focus.
What do you need to purge from your life?
Think about the classic, cliche idea of your home going up in flames, like Hill’s did. What would you take with you?
Unstuff Your Life, by Andrew J. Mellen
This is the one I haven’t read yet, but I’ve cracked the spine (so to speak, it’s hard to crack spines when I’m reading most things on a Kindle now) and am excited to dive into its 400+ pages of minimalistic wisdom.
It was actually recommended at the end of Genevieve Hill’s book, which makes it even cooler that I somehow got both without knowing about that connection!
As it stands, it looks like this is one of the authority books on decluttering — unstuffing our lives, and I 100% believe by the end of December things will be looking quite different around here.
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