I am not a domestic goddess.
Never have been, really.
Sure, I can cook. (And leave behind a pile of dirty pots and dishes.) And I do love decorating a new place.
But when it comes to actually keeping the place tidy enough so that a surprise visit won’t make me wish the ground would just open up and swallow me whole… I’m not it.
Which is why when my friend M. started talking to me about how she wanted to compile a “Home Management Binder” to get herself inspired and organized by keeping all her schedules etc in one spot, I scoffed. Only in my head, mind you – ’cause that would be bitchy and unsupportive, woulnd’t it? – but still, in my head I scoffed. Because I had tried that, and the only exciting part was actually putting together the stuff. (You know Monica from Friends? Her and I share a shameful, secret love affair with our label maker and a few not-so-secret slightly neurotic tendencies.) Once the binder was compiled, did the stuff get done? Hmmmm… not so much.
So there I was, mentally scoffing, but then I got to thinking: surely I cannot just give up on this. Sure I have tried many times before. So maybe it’s time to try again. After all, I hate stepping away from a challenge. I will prevail, dammit! Or to paraphrase Samantha from SATC, I will find my inner domestic goddess if it kills me.
So now that we are there again, let’s strategize: the last (and only, which explains why I remember it so clearly) time that my home was decluttered and cleaned top to bottom and stayed that way even if nobody was about to visit was… when I found feng shui.
Feng shui (pronounced fung shway) is an ancient Chinese discipline that is based on the belief that qi (read chi, meaning life force) should flow freely for optimal well being and smooth progress in all areas of our lives, and certain things in our home (especially clutter) can hamper chi and that can create problems in our life.
You may think it’s silly, but Feng Shui made me feel like cleaning and decluttering was worth the time I spent doing it, because it had more of a point to it than just spring cleaning.
Wouldn’t you want to declutter too if you thought it would help bring more money in? Wouldn’t you pay more attention to how tidy and clean a room was if you thought it would affect your sex life? Or your career?
And so I decluttered and cleaned. Until I found out that the form of feng shui I had been using was a westernized, watered- down, altered version of that antique Chinese discipline I thought I was applying, which made me feel like a silly poser – big turn-off. And when I ordered another book to try and figure out how to do it right, I was overwhelmed by mathematical equations and formulas (in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have ordered A Master Course In Feng Shui but something that resembled less an advanced physics class and more something with a title ending in For Dummies) and gave it all up, returning to my messy ways.
I think it’s time to give it another go. This time, I did things the easier way: I looked up feng shui on about.com and got started. And found that I am incredibly lucky because our apartment is built in such a way that our front door is precisely North-facing, which makes things ohsomucheasier when you are trying to map out your apartment.
So now here I am decluttering, since clutter creates stagnant chi and stagnant chi creates blockages in real life. (That is such an ominous word, isn’t it? “Blockage.” Yikes.) The bedroom was first, as promised, but the rest of the apartment could use a good decluttering session too.
Is this going to work? Can keeping the Living Room (Creativity corner) under control help me get rid of my creative slump? Is that disorderly shoe cubby in the Hallway the cause of my lack of focus? Will decluttering the bedroom improve my sex life? I don’t know, but it sure coulnd’t hurt – at the very least my closets are now a lot less scary. In the words of the fabulous Tim Gunn:
Closets are where we hide things: skeletons, forbidden loves, terrible birthday gifts we couldn’t return. It is for this reason that deciding what to wear while staring into those murky depths can be not just daunting, but emotionally exhausting as well.
- Tim Gunn, A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style
So there. Plus after I’m done decluttering, I have a great excuse for redecorating. After all, if I don’t straighten out the chi in our Money & Abundance corner, how am I going to fill all that free space in my now half-empty closets? I have been craving a colorful spring bag and I think it would be a great addition to my Relationship corner.
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