One of the
hazards of aging is that you begin to feel left out of all the latest trends in
food, music, movies, fashions, health, sports and organization. I’ve quit
watching awards shows because I don’t know who the popular musicians, actors
and scriptwriters are. Most of the “latest” fads are remakes of past fads, and
after a few decades, one can see the same fads return to fashion not once but
two or three times.
Consider women’s
fashions. I’ve seen hemlines go from mini to maxi and back again. I’ve seen
jeans go from skinny to bell bottoms and skinny again. Foods go in and out of
style. Two or three decades ago, food companies competed to have the lowest or
even zero fat. Now, it appears that fat is not all that bad. Eggs were bad for
you, and then they were good for you. Should I take a daily baby aspirin or
not? It depends on the year in which you are self-medicating.
The advice
swings like a pendulum. Automotive designs flip-flop, too. A few years ago, we
experienced a “retro” trend, in which you could buy a new car that looked oddly
like a 1930s or 1940s vehicle. Several years ago, carmakers adopted boxiness to
maximize interior space. Now, auto designers are giving us sweeping designs that
are as curvaceous as the Chrysler Airflow of the 1930s. How long before
tailfins from the 1950s come back?
All these
changes in fashion and design, as well as rapidly accelerating advances in
technology, have created another problem for the modern world: clutter. Without
any embarrassment, I admit that I have a suit that I bought in the early 1980s.
I still wear it, and it’s more in fashion today than it was 20 years ago. My
closet also has more recent vintage clothing, such as pleated slacks, that is
clearly no longer in style. I should get rid of the pleated slacks, but they
are still in great shape, and that seems so wasteful.
Some of us
become “hoarders” who just can’t stand getting rid of a perfectly good item in
the belief that we might need it someday. An older friend used to quote his
father’s wisdom: “It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and
not have it.” So we have houses cluttered with out-of-fashion clothes, car
parts, once-used tools, chipped glassware, mismatched dinner plates and old
photos of people we don’t recognize.
Marie Kondo has
come to save us, thus making her the latest trend that will someday be
forgotten until its next iteration. Kondo has apparently made quite an
impression with her YouTube videos of how your house should look. She preaches
a sort of hard-line practicality in demanding that we all face the music and
get rid of all that junk that is cluttering our closets and homes, not to
mention storage units. Does it bring you joy? If not, toss it out.
I am not
offended by Kondo’s principles, although I am not an obsessively organized
person. My desks throughout my working decades looked cluttered, but I knew
that each stack of paper had a purpose, and if anyone moved things around, I
wouldn’t be able to find what I was looking for. I am, however, a bit obsessive
(and I would guess Ms. Kondo is, too) in that I like having “a place for every
thing and every thing in its place” (a principle I learned in Coast Guard
Officer Candidate School, where that rule was strictly enforced).
I’m not spending
my time watching Marie Kondo videos or reading her books, but I am trying to
tidy things up a bit while I still can. But one thing bothers me. Kondo
recently decreed to her disciples that you should get rid of your books, but
then she softened her dictate to allow 40 books per household. That will never
happen at our house. We have at least ten times the allowable number of books.
Just in the bookshelves above my computer desk, I can count 37 books, and there
are other books in this spare bedroom and a large, jammed bookshelf just
outside the door. We’re not even counting the books downstairs in the built-in
bookcases, where there must be a few hundred books.
Kondo says you
should only retain items that “bring you joy.” Each of those books scattered
throughout the house brings joy to my wife or me, or both of us. So there!
We’ve kept these books (admittedly, we have given away 100 or more books in the
past few years) because they meant something to us, and we thought we’d like to
reread them. It’s cheaper to keep a book to reread than it is to buy it twice.
Sitting in the
living room with all those books and discussing literature, my wife and I came
to the realization that, at our ages, we might never get around to rereading
all the books we want to reread. But if a house cluttered with good books is
our legacy, that is just fine.
Hal Tarleton edited newspapers for 33
years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.
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