Trending on Netflix, there’s a show called Tidying Up. It features Marie Kondo, a ‘tidying expert.’ I read her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, last year and I’ve been enjoying her show. According to Marie, the first step to decluttering is to find out why you want to. Create a vision that you want to achieve, and then ask yourself why you want to reach that vision.

My vision is to have a clean house, where there’s room for the cats to run around without breaking anything, and plenty of comfortable spaces to sit and relax. Where there are lots of good books to read, and artifacts from around the world to look at and touch without worrying about knocking something else of a shelf. Where people feel comfortable, warm, and safe. That was the easy part.

It was harder to find the why.

For years now, I’ve been searching for simplicity.
I want to live a simpler life. I don’t like messy and complicated. I don’t like the stressful feelings from having more responsibilities than fit in the 24 hours I’m given each day. I don’t like puzzles and problems that feel unsolvable. I like simple and peaceful.

I think that’s my why.

If I can declutter my house and get rid of all of those things lying around that I don’t need and only surround myself with things that make me feel happy, I think it will help make my life simple and peaceful. By having less stuff to focus on, maybe I can focus on the important stuff more. I once read a quote about asceticism that pointed out that it’s not that you shouldn’t own anything, “but that nothing should own you.”

Peace doesn’t come from what we own, or what we give away.

While the blue jeans I picked up in Budapest make me smile and I always feel happy when I’m wearing my pink cowboy boots, happiness is a fleeting emotion. I’m seeking a deeper emotion that sits in the bedrock of my soul and comforts me whether I’m happy or sad, hungry or full, cold or hot, lost or found. This feeling held me in those two years when I was little that we lived in a van traveling around New England. This feeling held me when I sat on the floor of an empty room remembering what it had looked like filled. This feeling held me when we piled into an over stuffed station wagon to leave my first home, crawled into my grandfather’s truck move to Canada, and walked onto a 747 to head to Africa. This feeling held me when I signed the papers and bought my own house, and it’s holding me right now as I type these words.

That’s what I want to be able to spend my energy focusing on. The Peace that passes understanding. I want my house to become a place of peace that others can feel when they come in through the doors. I want to be able to come home from a frantic, hectic, crazy, emotional, exhilarating day at work and leave it all behind on the front porch.

That’s my why. I want to declutter and put my house in order so that it can become a place of peace in a chaotic world.