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Chapter 1: What is the key to decluttering our lives?
Hello and welcome to the Art of Decluttering podcast. I'm your host, Amy Revell. It is so good to be back with you this week. For those of you watching on YouTube, you'll see that I'm in my new studio, which I really am loving. It's just fresh and it's so good to kind of have an intentional space that I can record the podcast in every week.
So I hope that it is good for you to watch. I hope that the sound is still as good as you need it to be. So thank you for coming back. I've really enjoyed the episodes that we've covered so far this year. I feel like there's really been this theme of wellness and taking into account how we do things.
We've talked about how to get rid of things, where to begin, what to do when our habits get stuck and covering a whole lot of different topics. And I've really enjoyed it. I feel like I'm also growing in my knowledge of decluttering and minimalism, intentional living, organizing. I feel like I'm really growing in that as well. And that is what has triggered this week's episode.
So I've been reading a book called Uncluttered Faith by Joshua Becker. It's an excellent book. He is the author of The More of Less and The Minimalist Home. If you have been around the minimalist movement for any amount of time, Joshua will be someone that you've probably come across. There was six words in this book that really captivated my attention in the last couple of weeks.
And I've been ruminating on a lot and I wanted to share it with you guys. So it's in a story about a lady called Emily McDermott. And she says that over the last decade, she's learned to acquire less, require less, and desire less. acquire less, require less and desire less.
And I've really been mulling on those three different things that we want to have less of and thinking about how acquisition and requirement and desire and how they all intertwine with each other and how our relationship with those things and how we think about those things really affects the way that we live in our homes, the way that we treat our possessions, the way that we make decisions.
And it's really similar. If you go back and listen a few weeks ago, I talked about needs, wants and excess. And so I think this is a natural flow on from that conversation, but taking it in a different lens because, you know, my son said to me the other day, how are you still podcasting about decluttering? And the answer is because there's so many different ways to address it.
We come at it from a practical perspective. We come at it from a heart perspective. We come at it from a cognitive and like social science perspective. We come at it from our experiences and how things progress and how we think and how we feel. There's so many things to discover when it comes to decluttering. And this idea around acquisition, what do we want to acquire less?
We want to require less and we want to desire less really stuck with me. And so I wanted to give you some definitions of what acquire, require and desire are in this situation. So acquiring is what we bring in, what we choose to bring into our lives. It includes purchasing, accepting, collecting, inheriting or otherwise taking in possessions into our lives and normally into our homes.
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Chapter 2: How do acquire, require, desire, and admire influence our decisions?
And as with all of these decluttering theories, we want you to kind of have resources and tools so that you can think about stuff in a way that makes sense for you, works for you, is how your brain works and how it activates and actually plays out in your life. What I thought would be helpful is to have some questions you can ask yourself around each of these three phases.
Now, I'm going to start with the acquiring and go back, work our way back to desire because that's just the way that my brain works. But you could just as easily flip this completely on its head to hear some questions that can help you to acquire less. Do I really want to bring this item into my home? Do I have something else that serves exactly the same purpose?
am I just accepting this out of obligation? That's a really, really good one. Am I accepting this out of obligation? So that doesn't necessarily mean it's your birthday and someone gives you a present, you're accepting it. Like that's a socially polite thing to do. And I don't recommend that when someone gives you a present, you just, I don't want that thing.
But what about when someone has a big bag of kids' clothes and says, I'm decluttering these, would you like them? Maybe you do say yes out of obligation in that situation rather than the fact that you actually need some things. In that situation, instead of acquiring out of obligation, what you might do is say, oh, could I have a quick look through?
There are a couple of gaps in my kid's wardrobe. If I could just have a quick look through, maybe there's a couple of items that I could take and then please feel free to hand them on to someone else. Another area that acquisition can kind of come with that obligation and sense of like guilt is around inherited items.
And so there's podcast episodes that I've done in the past around like, how do you handle that inheritance stuff? How do you handle it when your mom says, this is really important to my family, you have to keep this or I'm handing this down to you and there's all this pressure. You don't have the space or the room or the desire for the object.
So a question around acquisition is, am I just accepting this out of obligation? Another question is, do I have somewhere for this to live in my home without it becoming cluttered? So if I take this into my home, is it really just going to sit in the corner of my bedroom? Is it going to sit somewhere that's just in the way, annoying? It doesn't actually have a home.
I don't have space for this item. You might ask, do I have the time and energy to look after this item? Because every item that you have in your home requires attention to keep it clean, to keep it organized, to tidy up after it, to know where it is, to be able to access it. There's lots of brain and energy power that goes into every item that you keep in your home.
So those are our questions around acquiring less. The next question is around requiring less. So does this item suit the life that I live today? Is it just aspirational? Is it like, yeah, I'd really like to do that thing? Or is it out of guilt of I really should be someone who does that thing? Another question is... what about this item is going to make my life easier or better?
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Chapter 3: What are the definitions of acquiring, requiring, and desiring?
And our electric sandwich press broke. All the electrics in it, it just wouldn't turn on anymore. We'd had it for a very, very long time. And so we had to throw it out. What we did is waited a couple of weeks. We're like, okay, is this something that we need to replace? We don't have any other way of toasting sandwiches. I mean, actually, that's not true.
What we could do, I have seen it done, is where you do it in a fry pan and you like put a weight on it so it squashes it down. That seems like a whole lot of work to me. And as an ADHDer, that's too many steps just to get a toasted cheese sandwich. It's not happening. So we waited a little while.
I spoke to one of my virtual clients who's also a podcast listener and she recommended to me a microwave sandwich press. It's excellent. It's a cast iron. You just put one in at a time. It's like three minutes in the microwave and it's actually crusty. It's I don't know how it works, but it's really good. So we ended up going out and buying that.
It's a much smaller item than the sandwich press that we had. And so we asked lots of questions. Is there anything else that can do the job that we want this to do? Do we have the room to store it? Yes, we do have the room to store it because we had something bigger before. It's replacing an item. We got rid of the old one first. Are we buying it out of any emotional desire or anything like that?
No, this is just a practical need of something that we need to buy. So we went out and bought it. We have a home for it. We're using it and it's integrated into our life really easily. Now, I've talked about this going from like you're acquiring, you want to require less, you want to desire less. But here's something you might actually want to do more. You actually might want to admire more.
And how I would describe admire in this scenario is items that you appreciate and you desire and you like, but you don't have to acquire. So you've got the appreciation and you've got the desire, but you're kind of skipping the require. You don't require it and you're absolutely skipping the acquisition of it. And so I've come up with some examples of how this looks in my life.
So one of the things is art. Like I love beautiful art. I really do, but I can't acquire it all. And so what I do is I admire art and I will look at it online. I'll look at it in a gallery. I'll look at it at a friend's house and I'll admire art. but I don't need to acquire it all. I mean, I don't have the space for it all, but the art that I do have, I really, really like.
Another is expensive clothes. I quite like seeing other people dressed up and looking amazing. However, I'm a grot. I have not told you this before. I'm forever spilling things on my clothes. I'm forever staining my clothes. I'm forever ripping my clothes. I walk into things and I rip them and I'm very, very hard wearing on my clothes.
So I don't buy expensive clothes because I will ruin them and I will be sad that I've just wasted all my money on a top that I've won 10 times and I've ruined it already. And so expensive clothes is something that I admire and beautiful clothes, something I admire, but I don't necessarily acquire. Books. I love reading.
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