Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Listening

Over the twenty-some years I’ve been helping people to deal with their stuff, I’ve come to realize that one of the most important things I do is listen. Yes, I can make your kitchen junk drawer look good, but some of the biggest breakthroughs happen when I just listen to clients talk about their stuff.

Sometimes, they tell me a story about a particular object, and then, somehow, the spell is broken and they can let go of a ticket stub or magazine article that had been lingering at the back of a cabinet for decades. They just needed to share the memory with someone in order to let go.

Other times, they tell me why they feel the need to keep so many cocktail dresses, even though they admit they rarely wear any of them. By sharing their reasoning out loud— “Well, I always think I might stain one, or maybe I won’t be able to afford things of this quality down the road. Some of them I don’t really like, but because I never wear them, they’re in good shape” —they suddenly hear how silly it sounds and are able to let go of some, if not most, of the dresses.

I’ll admit, I love this part of my work. It’s intimate, human connection, and I value that, not only because it’s an honor to be trusted with people’s quirky anxieties and deep-seated fears, but also because I love the stories and the people they reveal.

Last week, an octogenarian client and I went through boxes of papers that had been at the top of her closet. College essays, magazine articles she’d written in the Sixties, all great stuff. She didn’t need it. She did an amazing job of letting most of it go—and boy, did I get to hear some great stories. I had fun, and I think she did too.

Stories are what make us human.  A few years ago, I finally got rid of the steamer trunk my mother used to go to college and then to move to New York City from Little Rock, Arkansas. Later, I used it when I played Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. The trunk was huge, it was cool, it was a little musty. For years, I managed to work it into my décor and even used if for storage, but eventually it really needed to go. It took me a while, but I finally unloaded it to someone on Craig’s list, and as we hefted it into the back of her SUV, I told her the story of the trunk, and she loved it.  I was so grateful that I could pass on the object and its story. We all have too many objects and we have a habit of imbuing them with stories, making them talismans, which of course makes them harder to dispose of. But that is what we do as humans, and I can’t change that. But instead of hoarding your stories and your stuff, share them. When you do, you might just find it’s easier to let go when you’ve told another human being why this object is so significant. Because in the end, the stuff is cool, but the human connection is where the magic really lies.