'I didn’t know where my clutter ended and I began' – learning the art of decluttering

It’s a question, I suspect, designed to ignite the kind of feelings we should be looking for as we consider each object in our decluttering journey. Love is a key word for Shudo. When you consider whether to keep each object, or let it go, you ask yourself whether you “one hundred percent love it or not”.

So, to get into the groove, we begin with a question about love. I hadn’t expected this to be one of the first I would be asked, and I have to admit that lurking in the back of my mind is a previous interview I did with a decluttering expert. That woman had told me that some years ago she began to declutter her house using the method created by guru Marie Kondo – an approach in which one decides whether to keep an object by holding it up and asking whether it gives you a spark of joy. She went through the objects in her household, sorting and disposing, until finally she came to her husband and decided that he did not give her that spark of joy. She then packed the car with her children and a few possessions and drove off.

The story had left me with a mild terror around decluttering. What if one of us were to throw the other out into the world of recycling, along with the bin bags of unread books, uncomfortable clothes and useless gadgets? We have, after all, our ups and downs, like most couples. What if we were to declutter on a not “one hundred percent” day?

Fortunately that’s not what happens. We look at each other, a little awkwardly, as if taken by surprise, but it seems as good a moment as any, here, at the bottom of our stairs, to do what is effectively a renewal of our vows. “I will,” comes easily.

Shudo was recommended to me by a friend, who was already well into his own declutter process and heading towards a seriously minimalist life. He’d asked me if I had a clutter problem. I replied that I didn’t know where my clutter ended and I began. It may have been a mild exaggeration, but, truth be told, one key issue in my marriage and household, has been clutter, and I’m the worst culprit – though, it has to be said, Andy isn’t really so very much better.

Decluttering has been a zeitgeist activity for many years now, but, with the arrival this month on Netflix of Tidying Up, a series that follows Marie Kondo, creator of the Konmari method and author of Spark Joy, as she helps various households, there’s an extra buzz around it. Edinburgh-based Shudo’s approach shares a great deal with Kondo’s – it’s all about considering items, and asking how they make you feel, before allocating them to piles to keep, throw, or maybe keep. There’s a bit of ritual and thanking of objects. There’s also a lot of origami-style folding of clothing involved. So much folding, in fact, that my friend, after I’d started the process, texted me to ask, “Are you folding the f*** out of everything yet?”

But Shudo’s method is also subtly different from Kondo’s. She calls it “For the love of less” and says it goes deeper. Where Kondo asks people to consider whether something sparks joy – comparing it to the feeling that one has holding a puppy – Shudo asks whether you feel love. Her philosophy is also not just about getting rid of stuff – it’s about shifting towards a life of less.

“Fu-ai-ho”, meaning, “fear, love and abundance of nothingness”, is the Japanese expression she uses to describe her philosophy. She distinguishes it from the Japanese declutter tradition that most people follow, which is called Danshari, meaning refuse, separate and dispose. “My approach is much more positive. We are focussing on love and being in love with your life and your world and decluttering process is to achieve that.”

But what, I ask, is the difference between the love she speaks of and Kondo’s “joy”? “Joy,” she says, “is one aspect of love and love is deeper and broader. Marie Kondo is great at the process of decluttering, but what I’m focussing on is how we change afterwards. It’s about change for our life, but also for the whole planet by more consideration for the environment. Materialism and consumerism are creating a violence for our world – not only for the humans but also for the animals.”

The first room we poke a nose into is the office I share with Andy. On the wall, above the piles of paper and between bookcases over-flowing with books, is a painting which incorporates the word chaos, and the mathematical formula for it. Is it okay, we ask, to leave it on the wall? “Yes. I think so,” she says. “I think it could be the good message that we observe the chaos, but you two are not in it.”

We move on quickly to the wardrobe upstairs, which is the first space we are going to work on. I do feel slightly embarrassed about my mess, but, I also think I shouldn’t feel that way. No one should feel shame over a bit of mess, and, if I’m honest, for much of my life I’ve enjoyed time spent in relatively cluttered spaces. I grew up in one, and always felt that a certain amount of stuff was what came with a busy creative life.

Yet, people obviously do feel shame. I noticed that frequently, in Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up, those decluttering their lives in front of the camera, can be heard saying that they feel embarrassed or even “mortified”. As I go through this process, I’d like to avoid that. But, at the same time, I do feel it would be useful to move on from the mess. I have had the feeling in recent years that too much of my life was getting sucked into looking for things, too often there was so much stuff on my desk that I would choose to work at the kitchen table rather than there.

Shudo gets me to pull everything out from my wardrobe – the whole tangle of jumpers, T-shirts and dresses which I’ve stuffed onto shelves, unfolded – and put it on the floor. From there, I start dividing. One pile to keep, one maybe and one to verbally “thank” and throw out or pass on.

What is wonderful is that in her company you feel no judgement. I have no idea what she thinks about the individual objects I hold up, stare at, then choose a pile for. All I know is that she does a lovely encouraging clap every time you get rid of something significant. “Well done, Vicky. You are so brave.”

One thing becomes clear very quickly. My wardrobe contains many things that I have loved dearly but have literally worn to death – shoes with holes so large they are unfixable, a leather jacket that looks as if it has been dragged along a gravel track, boots that smell of dead rat. Then there are other items, almost never worn, some still with price tags.

I tell Shudo that most of these are gifts from my mum, who is a wonderful giver, and has given me some of my favourite things, but also quite a few that I don't wear.

She smiles with delight. “Wow. Beautiful mother. How lucky you are,” she says. “Such beautiful love. You can suggest to her a way of giving you present, for example, instead of clothes, something towards holidays or day trip somewhere, or weekends. If you have a conversation like I’m trying to reduce my stuff. We’re trying to keep minimum stuff in the house.” She adds that research by the Cornell University professor found that experiential purchases brought people more happiness than material purchases.

Then there are the clothing items from loved ones who have passed away – my grandmother, my brother, a dear friend. I hold in my hands a T-shirt, worn by my brother on a fun run, months before he was taken abruptly from the world by a pulmonary embolism three years ago. It seems to me I still feel his physicality there in that fabric. I put it on the “maybe” pile because I can’t really bring myself either to thank it or say that I love it. Both of those options seem too painful. I know the T-shirt is not my brother, the person I love, yet I can't bring myself to let it go. Shudo, as if sensing something, suggests we fold it up nicely and put it on the shelf.

She teaches me to fold. Folding is, it seems, the second part of the process, and at the heart of a storage system where you can see everything, where you need not waste moments in the search for an item. “You will enjoy folding every night after you have worn the clothes. And we will fold everything. Even underwear.”

We fold my brother’s T-shirt in on itself into a neat rectangle. There is something about seeing the T-shirt there, perfectly folded, at the end of the line of my own tops, not forgotten in a chaotic nest of fabric, that seems more comforting. Folding also feels prayerful.

There’s no doubt that a declutter is an emotional journey. It seems to me that at the heart of it is grief – not only the grief felt for those loved ones lost along the way, but for our past selves, our children’s babyhood, our own lives before children. Another item comes down onto the floor, a whole case from the cupboard above. It contains, in fact, only one piece of clothing, one, which I tell Shudo, I had been thinking about before she came.

It’s a ridiculous pink ballgown that I wore for the fancy dress party at which I got together with Andy. I was 35, celebrating my Halloween birthday with a kind of Dickensian party which I called Mis Havisham’s Tea Party Of The Undead, and wore a grey wig and horror make-up. We ran around outside in Holyrood park. The bottom of the dress got stained with a layer of mud. It was trashed, and, two babies later, my body can no longer fit into it. Yet, still, I have kept it.

Shudo offers a suggestion, perhaps I could put the dress on and have a photograph taken in it, maybe with Andy. “You’re joking. It wouldn’t meet,” I said. Instead, we agree that I will hold it up in front of me and we will have a shot taken of the two of us together. It feels like a second renewal of vows – I keep him, he keeps me, but we throw this, the dress, away – and before I know it, it is squeezed into a bin bag. One of Shudo’s tips is that once bagged up you must get your thanked and discarded items out of the house as quickly as possible, and certainly within 24 hours, so it is gone by the end of the night – all that’s left a picture on my phone. Three bin bags accompany it out the door, those ones to the charity shop.

Shudo grew up in rural Japan. It is, she says, a "very organised society" – at schools children learn to clear up after their activities. Her parents, she says, are “very minimalist”.

“Their house is very simple, for example bit of grass matt on the floor and one big table and maybe seasonal flowers in a vase, and maybe calligraphy, that’s it. ” As a teenager she didn’t appreciate so much what her mother taught her, but when she left Japan at the age of 20 to go to America, where she studied performing arts, she started to reconnect with it.

She is now a master of the tea ceremony, a title it took her 20 years of training to earn. Zen is at the heart of her philosophy. One of the things she talks frequently about is “an abundance of nothing”. I have to admit that the first time she used that phrase I felt a pang of terror. But she is keen to make clear that this is a good place. “It is nothingness, but you’re automatically connected to everything. Releasing our attachment to something automatically makes us reunite with the whole universe.”.

There have, recently, been plenty of people out to dismiss Konmari and other decluttering processes, either as a frivolous trend or the privilege of the wealthy. But what’s clear is that people are drawn to decluttering philosophies because they address the problems of our consumerist world. Shudo is not interested in creating space so that we can create for ourselves a trendy minimalist look, or fill it up with new fast fashion or plastic junk. She is about providing a journey through which, she says, it’s possible both to find our “authentic selves” while using less.

What becomes clear is that what I have started is a long process. The friend who encouraged me, for instance, tells me that he has read of a Japanese minimalist who took five years to declutter his life. It’s the next stage, says Shudo, after the purifying, that is key. “From this point when you come to the balanced level, harmonised with love, and look into the future, you will probably start to consider more what to buy and selecting better, and so in that way of looking there will be ongoing process of maintaining intelligent buying.”

That all sounds very alluring. A lot of “fu-ai-ho” does. I’m also thrilled to have some origami-like folding skills to teach my children and a surprisingly enjoyable activity to do with my husband, one which feels like it will bring us together. In the whole process, there is, for me only one moment of regret, and it is a brief one. Later, when Shudo was gone, I couldn’t stop thinking about the pink ball gown. This was mainly because, instead of putting it with the charity items for recycling, I had put it in the bin, thinking it was too trashed to be of use to anyone. So, I went down in the dark to the skip and peered into its reeking shadows, hoping to rescue it. The bin was already heaped high and my dress at the bottom, beneath piles of wooden planks and oozing binliners, too hard to reach. Only then, in fact, did I really decide that it truly was time to let it go. That dress had served me well. I could release it to the universe with thanks.

Mio Shudo can be contacted at mio@fortheloveofless.com