My daughter just fell asleep for a nap. She rarely naps anymore. I could do dishes. Or some writing. Or goal-setting. Or decluttering. But, instead of listening to my buzzing brain, I think I will listen to my exhausted body and take my own nap. After I post this. Zzzzzzz.

Weather forecast for Vancouver, courtesy of The Tragically Hip 🎵:

The rain came down berserk

My music at work

My music at work

Honestly, though, I have no idea what this song is about.

I’ve been basking in this article by Maria Popova on The Marginalian - Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past. Such beautiful and gentle lessons of kindness, compassion, understanding and love.

Paper is one of my biggest clutter hang-ups. Old birthday cards, half-used journals, and especially my 3-year-old’s artwork. Any suggestions for the latter? My current idea is this: Display the art of the season, then scan. Keep favourites filed away and recycle the rest.

Decluttering continues around Merlin’s Table. I decided to drop the leaf and the area feels larger now, cluttered floor notwithstanding. I’m starting to see this table as a centre point around which to carve out space for our family to live and play freely.

Jowls comfortably tucked into underbite 🐶 📷

Three-year-old:

My favourite colour is green. and orange. and purple. and rainbows. and blue and red and purple and green and yellow.

(Also, happy Epiphany!)

Tried making maple syrup snow candy for the first time. I just winged it without a candy thermometer so some of it was gooey, some chewy, and some brittle. But it tasted great!

Today (this week… the past two years…) didn’t go quite as I had planned. My daughter was going to be at daycare today and my husband and my sister were going to be at work. I was going to focus on decluttering the small table in our kitchen. But Omicron has been tearing through our neighbourhood and both my sister and I feel slightly under the weather. We’ll hunker down for a couple weeks here. I feel so lucky that we can afford to do that. I’m not working right now and my husband can work from home. We’re fortunate enough to be in a situation where we can keep our daughter home from daycare without fear of losing income. So here we are, all home together, myself with an itchy throat, my sister with a small cough, all wearing masks in hopes of keeping each other from getting sick.

But I’ve been raring to get rid of clutter, and somehow things came together. Honestly, it probably helped to have everyone home. I get demotivated very fast when I’m home on my own. Netflix is always there… waiting for me. One episode turns into a whole season and there goes my life. Aaaanyways! Back to decluttering… and to a very special table: Merlin’s table.

It sounds like some kind of allegorical reference to the mystery and magic of life together around the kitchen table. But no, my husband and I just bought a cheap old table from a man on Craigslist whose name was literally Merlin. It’s thanks to him that we can now sit together and eat our breakfast around Merlin’s table. Hmmm… actually, as you can probably see from the photos, there is only space for two people to eat there at one time. Hopefully, that will change as our kitchen is gradually transformed by the power of Getting Rid of Things.

I was going to spend more time going over the process of decluttering, but I got caught up in the rest of the story. At any rate, I more or less followed the “Steps for Working through an Overwhelming Mess” from Dana K. White’s book Decluttering at the Speed of Life, which I’ve talked about in my previous posts (the book, not the steps). It took me probably one to two hours, total, but spread out over at least 24 hours. One of the nice things about the author’s steps is that you can work on decluttering for as little as a few minutes at a time, but there will always be progress made. A lot of paper went into our recycling bin today. Many toys were returned to their homes. And now I will have the satisfaction of a clean and tidy (Merlin’s) table. Hurray!

I tend to have a pretty bad memory for events and the timeframes in which they occur. So when I asked myself the other day, “What did I do in 2021?” I couldn’t really come up with much. Taking some time now to reflect on my life this past year.

Significant Roles and Activities

• Caring for our daughter, in partnership with my husband
• Volunteering on a crisis line for women experiencing domestic violence
• Working as a support worker at an inner-city detox centre
• Taking a course on counselling theories
• Taking a course on basic counselling skills
• Applying to a counselling psychology master’s program

Looking at it now, that seems like a lot! But I didn’t do all those things at once. That said, it has been a very significant year for me in terms of living and acting in better alignment with my life goals and passions. For many years before my daughter was born, I went pretty far afield from my long-term interests. Maybe it wasn’t so much “going astray” as it was taking a break after burning out. I’m coming back stronger now with a better knowledge of myself, greater self-compassion, and a child looking up to me.

Areas of Personal Growth

• Developing greater self-awareness (seeing a counsellor, reading, journaling, etc.)
• Learning about parenting - gentle, respectful, loving, consistent, authoritative parenting
• Re-establishing a regular writing practice (still going strong!)
• Re-establishing a regular yoga practice (not so successful!)
• Learning about nutrition and working on better eating habits
• Learning about my apprehensions and fear around writing and creativity

One thing I’d like to work on in 2022 is really watching my energy levels so that I have enough for the people and interests I care about the most. I tend to be tired a lot of the time. I know part of it is related to hypothyroidism. Part is linked to my tendency toward depression. Part of it is my boundaries - I’ve learned in the last two years that my boundaries are pretty weak. I also live in a chaos of clutter, which I believe saps my energy as well. That’s one of the main reasons I’m working on decluttering this year. I’ll be writing about my progress in the coming weeks!

I love webcomics. These were my favourites in 2021: - Brainchild - Daughter of the Lilies - Gunnerkrigg Court - Barbarous (Johnny Wander) - Monster Pulse (ended in June 2021) - Never Satisfied - Rigsby, WI - Sister Claire - Sleepless Domain - The Otherknown - Witchy

My favourite music last year was Benjamin Clementine’s 2015 album At Least for Now 🎵. I could and did listen to “Winston Churchill’s Boy” on repeat for hours.

A-ha! I now know where to focus my efforts first when I start my decluttering in earnest on January 5th. Before I get into that, here’s a bit about my home: Myself, my husband, our daughter, and my sister, plus our dog, live together on one floor of a two-level house. We have a living room, a kitchen, and 3 bedrooms. Unsurprisingly, all of our rooms serve multiple purposes. For instance, the master bedroom is also the computer room. My husband has used it as his workspace for many months during COVID-19. But the room that does the most multitasking is our kitchen.

One end of our kitchen is dedicated to typical kitchen-related tasks: cooking and storing food, cookware, dishes, etc. But on the far end of the kitchen, there is a lot more going on. It’s the back entry (and the entry we use most often) to our house. We keep our shoes and coats and bags there. We keep our dog bowls and food there. There’s a small table where we have our breakfast oatmeal. But there’s only a small portion of the already small table available for eating - it’s mostly covered in stuff: boxes, papers, toys, tools, etc. Next to the table, we have a small storage unit where we keep our arts and crafts materials. We also have a piano in this space. Surely the piano would make more sense in the living room, but it’s in our kitchen because of sound-transfer reasons. This sad piano is also covered in stuff. In fact, my sister, the one who mostly uses the piano, wasn’t able to play it for several months last year due to all the clutter on top of and all around it. This far end of our kitchen - this breakfast nook/entryway/dog dining area/piano room/art supply area - is where I will be focusing my decluttering efforts first.

The reason I want to start my decluttering in this heavily-used part of my kitchen is that it is the part that people see first, upon entering our home. This is based on the “Visibility Rule” from Dana K. White’s book 📚, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. The idea is that, when endeavouring to declutter your home, you want to start with the most visible spaces first. And this is because it helps to keep your energy level and motivation high when you (and your guests) can see the results of your efforts. Interestingly, White suggests starting your decluttering work in the same area every time you declutter. Although it will take substantial effort and time to work through the space the first time, she argues that subsequent decluttering efforts in the same space will become faster and faster, enabling you to both maintain the decluttered-ness of the first space and gradually extend your decluttered area further and further into your home.

I’m looking forward to and dreading the start of my decluttering, but I can see how this “Visibility Rule” could help me to stay motivated. Frankly, I feel a lot of shame about the messy state of my home, and I like that this rule enables me to focus first on creating a space that I can be proud of in an area that will actually be seen. So, one day, once it’s ok to do so from a COVID-19 standpoint, I can hopefully feel good about having guests over. Happy New Year!