The exact right thing

[mrissa]

Today it's been over three weeks since the three-day flooring project began. It will not end today. I hope it ends this week but who knows. I have learned to just...go with whatever is, to not rely on this uncertain world and so on. And so for basically a month we've been living with the uproar of not being able to have things on the main floor of the house, because we had to have it cleared out in advance. This has been...not great. We've coped. We've done quite a lot of coping.

But it's given me insight, I think, into what people want of minimalism. Right now there are rooms in my house that are the purest minimalism. They have nothing in them. It's hard to get more minimalist than that, and yet: that is not what minimalism wants. Other rooms are stuffed with more than what they're supposed to have, they're impossible to use or merely annoying and difficult, because the things that are quite usable in their usual space are overwhelming when crammed in. So--and I know this is not unique to me--I feel like minimalism is a fantasy of having the exact right stuff.

It's about knowing exactly what you're going to need and having only that. Not the stuff you thought you might need, or the stuff you thought looked cool when you were twenty and now you're forty-one and you're less sure. Not the stuff someone else thought you might need. And especially not the stuff someone else thought looked cool and it was never really quite right for you but also not wrong enough to get rid of. Just exactly the right stuff, exactly where you can get to it.

Living life inevitably comes with baggage--emotional baggage as well as physical. If you're a person who reaches forty without things and people in your life, that itself is emotional baggage, that itself is a story. Even if you're happy that way, it's a set of things that have happened to you and ways you've reacted. When we were packing up wedding presents into a U-Haul to move to California when I was 21, my uncle sighed and said, "When I was 21, I could just...throw my guitar in the backseat and drive off into the sunset," and I said, "Uncle Pete, I'm a pianist." Which is symbolically as well as literally true; I was never going to be someone who had a guitar and a kit bag for her entire life.

I do understand wanting to have the right things, though. Not too much and not too little. Not so much of the things that seemed right but weren't that you can't get to the things that are actually delightful, or even just functional. Enough of the backups that you don't have a crisis when something is no longer working, but not so many that you drown in them. Balance, balance, balance.

Right now having things cleared out is making me look at all of it very carefully. Do I really want this, no, really, no, really. When everything goes back in those rooms, should it. I have already realized that I am probably not going to play my flute again, that the future in which I have more time for music doesn't probably mean a future in which I devote it to the flute. So someone else can enjoy that, rather than having it gather dust in the corner of the music room, between the pianos that we do still want. Nobody with two pianos can reasonably be called a minimalist. But still: the right things, the things we do want, and not the things we don't, sure, yes, I see that.

Right now that includes my oven, I want my oven back....

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Helpfully insightful, thank you very much!

(My mom was also a two-pianos person — she shipped her childhood baby grand 1000 miles to me when her father died, because she wanted me to be a piano person. For those reading along at home, never do that.)

[kore]

minimalism is a fantasy of having the exact right stuff.

Hah, yes.

(What I always remember about Marie Kondo is supposedly she got rid of unnecessary tools, then needed a screwdriver, so she used a favourite pretty ruler. Which snapped. That would so happen to me, if I tried to get rid of "but I don't even know what this does so we don't need it" tool drawer junk.)

My mom not only had two pianos she had two grand pianos (one her parents bought for her, one my dad bought -- I was supposed to get both). I had a flute and mocked her when I was a bratty adolescent with how portable it was. I wound up selling it for about half its value to a musical instruments shop for cash when I was broke, and I wasn't that good at it, but I still miss it. OTOH my house is now full of things that seemed small enough to keep without much of a strain, when I got them....boxes and boxes of them....

[swan_tower]

and I said, "Uncle Pete, I'm a pianist."

<golf clap>

My watershed moment in "having the right stuff" was when I had to pack to go to college. My parents are still, even now, living in the house they moved into about six months before I was born; I had never had to address my stuff en masse to any degree higher than packing for a three-week summer camp. I basically spent the entire summer between graduation and leaving for college doing a comprehensive overhaul of my belongings, because I couldn't figure out where to even begin with selecting the physical impedimenta of my new life unless I first conducted a massive cull of the old one. I'm not going to claim I became a minimalist or that I have never since then had a problem with too much stuff/the wrong stuff, but it did help a lot; in hindsight, I think the process had a lot in common with Marie Kondo's "spark joy" idea.

But yes: the exact right stuff. And also knowing where it is, such that when somebody says "oh, I need X" or you want to revisit Y, you can put your hands on it without hesitation. It pleases me immensely when I can do that. And it's a lot easier when there aren't piles of the wrong things blocking your way.

May you get the main floor of your house back as soon as possible.

[mrissa]

My childhood featured a couple of moves at what turned out to be quite relevant times. When we moved to Kansas the summer I turned 11, I packed up my toys and...never unpacked them again. I was allowed to! I had space to! I just never had the urge. So I never had anything quite like what you're describing.

But I do think that "what am I bringing to college" and "who do I think I am at college" often overlap substantially.

I remember having loads of pictures of high school friends my freshman year, I remember that being very, very important, and over time that got shifted to the people I had actually stayed friends with, and instead of a collage being put up in my room it was a few in a photo album along with pictures of family and current friends, which, yep, yep, that.

[mrissa]

I am actually a one-piano person, but so is T, and they're not the same piano for very good reasons.

[mrissa]

There are a lot of stories about Marie Kondo out there, so I went looking and found an actual citation for the screwdriver one. I expect that was a lesson learned: we don't need every specialized tool on the market, but some things are considered basics for a reason, and screwdrivers are generally on that list.

I have often thought that about Ikea furniture, actually: that the number of circumstances in which I want to build something without a hammer and a screwdriver is pretty small. Mostly if I want to build a bookcase, I will be willing to have a screwdriver and a hammer on hand. Because they are better tools for that job.

[pameladean]

Two more or less side comments:

If you keep the wrong stuff around too long it becomes too right to get rid of because it has stories and memories around it.

I sympathize so much with your wanting your oven back, having lived without a working upstairs oven and with a downstairs one that liked to set people's hair on fire for really much too long. But I am also suddenly smitten with the idea of a filk of Saul Williams's "List of Demands" that begins, "I want my oven back."

Here's a cover of it should you wish to go down that path, which most likely you don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg9lSgTsl9w

P.

[mrissa]

I am more in Robot Devil "I want my HANDS back" mode but for stove, but I am amused all the same.

[cynthia1960]

Oh, yes, all this. Thank you for this.

[green_knight]

I am in a phase of reordering and organising and getting rid of stuff and mainly _thinking_ about how to curate stuff so I regain some physical space and much-needed brainspace, and _I feel like minimalism is a fantasy of having the exact right stuff._ resonated with me.

Thank you for that.

[pameladean]

*looks up reference* *wonders why her sweetie-curated experience of Futurama does not include this* *watches* *falls over laughing, especially at decide upon/automaton*

Yes indeed, I can see that.

I'm glad you were amused just the same.

P.

[vcmw]

This is such an excellent description and also your ongoing month of no oven sounds so awful.
A working, accessible oven is one of those things that is excellent. Toaster ovens can sort of substitute for just one person, or sometimes two. But they are an inexact substitute at best.

[mrissa]

I have no idea, because that episode is one of the best episodes of anything ever and certainly of Futurama.

"Back to hell! Come on, Nixon!"

[mrissa]

Yah, Mark has made several toaster oven sandwiches. I think if there was only one of us--and if my mother's house was not so nearby and so additionally endowed with comfy chairs, my mother, and the dog--whichever one might have leaned much more heavily on the toaster oven.

As it is, I've made serious inroads in the "individual portions of previously homemade soups, frozen for my convenience" section of the freezer where lunches are concerned, but suppers have mostly been Chez Mor.

[athenais]

Maybe that's why I've never understood the longing for a tiny house, the reduction of belongings to stark minimalism: I don't truly know what the right things would be to keep. I don't have a longing for having only the exact right stuff with me. I'm sure I could happy ditch about 50% of what's in my house and never miss it, but I'm not keeping it because I love it, I'm just constantly worried that it'll end up in landfill which isn't what I want for it. Give away, donate, freecycle, recycle, and yet still there is all this stuff.

An oven, though, man. A person has to have an oven! At least you have a fridge again.

[mrissa]

Oh, I've had a fridge! It's just been in the library.

...good times, good times.

[vcmw]

This seems like a very Wodehousian place for a fridge.

I can picture Bertie wandering in to grab a sandwich and staring baffledly at the fridge and then wandering out, or wandering in to get a book and finding himself pleasantly surprised to also have a sandwich.

He would be sure Jeeves had a perfectly good reason for putting the fridge in the library that for some reason had slipped his mind, surely it had been explained to him, lose his own oven next. Not that he exactly knew where his oven was in the first place, or what it looked like, but it was the principle of the whatsit.

[mrissa]

I have felt like it was the principle of the whatsit many times this month.

[netmouse]

Rosie wants to learn to play the flute, she says. Right now she’s learning violin.

We have but one piano, but I’m glad it’s here.

[mrissa]

I haven't rehomed it yet, but it also hasn't been refurbished. Do you want me to send it to you?

[netmouse]

That would be awesome!

We’re at 1471 Sleepyhollow Rd, York PA 17403.

I don’t know anything about refurbishing. Is there a standard set of things that should regularly done?

[mrissa]

I have no idea either, that's the sort of thing I would have left to a donation program, so you should probably ask R's music teacher. Hurrah for a new home!