Make “into my wallet” your motto
Do you have loose change lying around—a penny or two in the bottom of your purse, a dime in the back of a drawer, a quarter on the table? I always find coins when I’m helping clients put their house in order. The king of the komono category, coins can be found in the entrance hall, the kitchen, the living room, the washroom, on top of furniture, and inside drawers. Despite the fact that coins are perfectly good cash, they are treated with far less respect than paper money. It seems strange that they should be left lying around the house where they are of no use at all.
Whenever my clients come across loose change during tidying, I make sure it goes straight into their wallets—never into a piggybank. Unlike the other categories, you don’t need to gather coins from every part of the house. Instead, just pop them into your wallet whenever you stumble on them. If you put them in a piggybank, you are simply transferring the place where they will be ignored. People who have lived in the same house for a long time are particularly prone to forgetting about their little cache of coins. Frankly, no one I’ve met who saved pennies without a clear purpose has ever actually used them. If you are saving coins with the vague idea that it would be nice to see how many you can accumulate, now is the time to take them to the bank. The longer you wait, the heavier your cache will be, and the more bother to take it to the bank.
I have also noticed that for some unfathomable reason many of my clients start saving coins in bags when their piggybank is full. Years later during my course, they stumble across a bag bursting with coins in the back of a cupboard. By that time, it is pungent with the smell of rust and mold, the coins are discolored, and they make a dull clinking sound instead of jingling. At this point, my clients would rather just ignore the bag’s existence. Writing this description is hard enough, but to actually see these coins, stripped of their dignity as money, is heartrending. I beg you to rescue those forgotten coins wasting away in your home by adopting the motto “into my wallet!”
Sentimental items
Your parents’ home is not a haven for mementos
Now that you have organized your clothes, books, papers, and komono, you can finally tackle the last category—items that have sentimental value. I leave this for last because these are the hardest things to discard. Just as the word implies, mementos are reminders of a time when these items gave us joy. The thought of disposing of them sparks the fear that we’ll lose those precious memories along with them. But you don’t need to worry. Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them. When you think about your future, is it worth keeping mementos of things that you would otherwise forget? We live in the present. No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and now are more important. So, once again, the way to decide what to keep is to pick up each item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?”
Let me tell you about a client of mine whom I’ll call “A.” She was a thirty-year-old mother of two in a five-member household. When I visited her house for our second session, it was obvious that the number of things in her home had decreased. “You really worked hard,” I said. “It looks like you must have gotten rid of about thirty bags’ worth of stuff.”
Looking very pleased, she said, “Yes, I did! I sent all my keepsakes to my mother’s place.” I could hardly believe my ears. She had used the “send it to my parents” method of tidying. When I first started this business, I actually thought that being able to send things “home” was the privilege of people who came from large houses in the country. The majority of my clients were single women or young mothers living in Tokyo. If they asked permission to send things to their parents’ house, I said, “Sure. As long as you do it right away.” I never thought anything of this until my clientele expanded to homes in rural towns. When I learned the true state of parents’ houses, I was forced to retract my rash words.