Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Pretending to Move

Last week, Ann Patchett had a great piece about decluttering in The New Yorker. She is a wonderful writer, and everyone should read it, but one line in particular got me thinking. After helping her friend to empty her father’s house, Patchett begins toying with the idea of downsizing her own home, and says to her husband at dinner, “Maybe we could just pretend to move.” This made me laugh, because this imagination game is a common organizing trick. I’ll ask a client, “If you had to put the apartment on the market/move/have people over for dinner, what would you let go of?”

But it also spoke to me on a deeper level. I often look around my apartment and think, When I move, that’ll go, that’ll stay; hopefully a kid will take that. The article also reminded me of a frequent fantasy I had as a kid. I used to imagine that if we could move, somehow my mother would be happier. Without yet having the language of feminism, I somehow felt my mother was trapped by our apartment: the housewife trapped by the house. Of course, since the apartment was rent-controlled, in a way she was trapped. Now in retrospect, I’d give anything for that classic six on the Upper West Side, but at the time, I sensed we were stuck—that we needed to be shaken up.

We all need a shakeup sometimes. It’s good to breathe some air into things, and as Patchett realized, we don’t necessarily have to give up our current, perfectly good homes to do it. Spring always makes me want to open the windows and shake out the (metaphorical) cobwebs. I’m considering tackling a big paint job over the summer, and even though it’s daunting, I feel like it might be great to take the paintings off the walls, pull the books off the shelves and then really see what I want to put back.

It is good for things in your home to have a place they belong, so you can put them away. But if things never move, it’s a clue that you may have some stuff you don’t need.

You don’t need to take on a big paint job or renovation, you don’t even need to pretend you’re moving (though sometimes it’s fun), just take a look around and see what might benefit from a little shake-up. Spring is coming, but we’re still spending a lot of time at home. So maybe open a window and open a cabinet, and you might just find that you are ready to let go.