I don’t know about you, but I have a terrible affliction called “I never know when to throw something away.” You may know this affliction by its other name, “hoarding.” OK, look, before you get all grossed out, it’s not like you have to weave through piles of old newspapers to get into my house. I don’t have stacks of moldy books and magazines lining the hallways. Nobody opens a closet door and has a bunch of Christmas decorations come crashing down on them.
My garage, on the other hand, is a mess. And when I say “mess,” I mean that there are boxes in there that were packed 20 years ago and moved from our first house to our second house. And then to our third house. They are unlabeled. They have never been opened. They are scary and I’m afraid to even look at them, let alone open them up and discover what’s inside.
So I had heard about an organizing expert named Marie Kondo, who wrote The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I’ve heard about her book mainly because everyone who has seen my garage has mentioned it.
Clearly, I needed to clean up the garage. But according to Kondo you can’t just clean out the garage. You have to clean by categories. So after careful research and weeks of finding excuses not to clean out any part of the garage, I decided to clean out our wine. And yes, I am well aware the category I selected should have been “scary, unlabeled, boxes.” But let’s be honest. Which one sounds more fun? Looking at wine bottles? Or opening some old, scary boxes?
Of course my choice of category was easily justified. I have a terrible wine problem. It’s not that I drink too much of it, it’s that I like to go wine tasting. And after an hour or so of tasting, suddenly every wine tastes wonderful and before I know it, there’s a couple cases sitting in the back of my car. Look, as problems go, having too much wine sitting around isn’t awful. I refrigerate it. I take care of it. There’s just a lot of it.
So I followed Kondo’s instructions. For Step 1, I touched each wine bottle. I thought about whether the wine was happy in the fridge—which, obviously, it was. I mean, it’s
WINE. How could it not be happy? Have you ever seen sad wine? No. Wine is not sad. It is happy and friendly and it loves me.
And that was how I knew I could never, ever follow the Step 2: get rid of that which doesn’t spark joy. For Pete’s sake, wine’s only job is to spark joy. So I have decided my wine will be sparking lots of joy this summer. When it will be shared with my friends, who also spark joy.
And yes, in case you were wondering, I still have scary, unlabeled boxes in my garage. Hey, this decluttering thing takes baby steps.
