I made this photo in 2013, when I was clearing out some old books to make room for new ones. As the years roll on, I am still learning how to let go of old possessions. And the real trick is to stop accumulating new possessions.

By now, you have probably heard of Marie Kondo, the Japanese tidying guru who recently got her own Netflix show. I’m fairly certain I first heard of her in 2014 or 2015; regardless she’s made an impact in the U.S. because of our obsessive buying and keeping of things — and our resulting clutter that cries out for someone to help us get rid of it.

The reason I mention Kondo is because my wife recently began watching the Netflix show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo (the link is to a decent review in The Atlantic). I immediately knew why my wife would be drawn to the show; the woman I married is a compulsive throw-awayer, basically the opposite of a hoarder. Raised in compact Bronx apartments, my wife and her family never accumulated many possessions, and she kept up that habit through years in tiny college dorms and even more years in other compact Bronx apartments. I knew my wife would enjoy watching this confident woman ordering around possession-heavy Americans and guilting them into throwing things away.

On the other hand, I grew up in increasingly expansive suburban homes, the last one of my childhood being just less than 3,000 square feet on three-quarters of an acre. We weren’t hoarders in the sense that we kept everything, but we did have the space to easily keep things that we didn’t really need. I recall my father having several boxes of old aviation-themed magazines from the 1970s, for example, and I remember how difficult it was for him to throw out most of them several years later. My mother saved quite a few of our childhood toys and books — I hadn’t realized quite how many until she began giving them back to me for my own children. I inherited the knack of accumulating (and then holding onto) stuff that it truly wasn’t necessary to keep.

When my wife met me in 2005, I was living in a two-bedroom walkup; both bedrooms had walk-in closets. There was a walk-in closet under the stairs. Just for fun, there was a spacious built-in cabinet at the top of the stairs, between the landing and the bathroom (this cabinet was always my favorite feature of the apartment). It had two sides — one accessible from the landing side and the other accessible from inside the bathroom. None of this space was filled, but it allowed me to easily keep things I didn’t need and would never have any use for. For example, there were tires in one closet.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I began “going through old stuff” about the time we moved to Killeen in 2009. It was one of my primary jobs for a few months. But I was never completely successful. Some of that is because taking care of two children takes up a lot of time, and some of it is because I am the type of person who is never bored — always easily filling my free time, whether with writing, photography, reading, enjoying the outdoors, etc. — instead of finishing my chore of downsizing. But a lot of it, I’m sure, is that I am fundamentally different than my wife and have a hard time throwing things away*. So this task occasionally gets revived, but then reshelved, over the years. The photo above is from an effort in 2013 to get rid of extra books I was holding onto. Many of them were second copies.

(* To be sure, we’re not dumping stuff in the trash. Books and other media are sold to resale shops. Clothes are donated to local charities. Many things are recycled. But “throwing stuff away” is usually easier to say.)

Back to the TV show: I knew my wife would enjoy it; what I did not expect is that she would learn yet another way of getting rid of stuff. A healthier way. Unlike many other reality shows, Kondo deals with semi-normal people who have simply collected too many things. There’s no spectacle, no pronouncements of guilt or shame, no severe measures taken. The question Kondo asks participants on her show is: “Does it spark joy?” There’s a more complex translation of the Japanese word, but the general idea is to hold each thing — shirt, jacket, sock, book, ornament, whatever — and ask yourself whether it gives you a good, joyful feeling to continue owning it. Not mentioned on the show, perhaps because it’s obvious, is that some things are useful and that’s why we keep them. I have a hammer because it comes in handy, not because it makes me feel good in any way. Same thing with a toilet plunger. But when we’re talking about 32 shirts or 16 pants or 20 pair of shoes, asking the “joy” question makes an excellent way of deciding whether to keep something.

This changed something in my wife, in a good way. Her previous throwing-away practices were often draconian, brutal affairs. Kondo’s method offered her the opportunity to pleasantly deal with extra possessions. People on the show are instructed to say “thank you” to items they cull — acknowledging that those items did indeed serve a purpose at one time, even if it was only the dopamine rush upon purchasing them.

My wife took to this like a [insert cute simile here] and literally paused the show so she could go to her closet and start piling her clothes. That was Friday. It continued Saturday, with books, old papers, photos — and I’m talking about her stuff, which was already in short supply.

I was already slowly moving through my stuff again as I paint the office in anticipation of it someday being our son’s bedroom. I picked up the pace a little as I saw my wife getting motivated. I cleared out another 60 books or so. I gave away a shirt and threw out two pair of socks that I’ve never really liked — they didn’t “spark joy”. Two blazers. Two sweatshirts. We found and disposed of several items in our closet for which we can no longer remember a reason to keep.

Then I looked down and saw my five-year-old son going through his papers. He has an accordion-style plastic folder in which he keeps some of his kindgergarten assignments and other papers of interest to him. He was going through them one-by-one, asking himself if they sparked joy. More than half of his papers, he took to the recycling bin without being asked.

I was so proud of him. Most of all, I became hopeful that my children will grow up a little more like their mother did and have a little less of my tendency to keep things.

Another thing the show didn’t address, and maybe it should have, is that “tidying” is only a first step in the rest of our lives. No matter how many things we remove from the home today, next week we’re going to be in Target, or Sam’s Club, or World Market — and we’re going to see something we want. That thing is going to come home and need a place to be put. And this process will continue until we again realize our need to “go through old stuff”.

In other words, the real trick is to stop acquiring stuff in the first place. The accumulation that the show addresses is only possible because of the acquisition. And THAT is where many of us need to retrain our brains.

Over the years, I have gotten better about this. And my wife and I have helped each other. But we could stand to improve our lines of defense. For each item in our shopping cart that isn’t consumable, we need to ask ourselves a series of questions, some of which we already ask occasionally, but probably not often enough.

• Where in our house will we put this thing?
• What will it replace?
• How often will we use it?
• How long before this becomes something we will throw away?

And, perhaps now, after watching Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, we will also learn to ask ourselves: will this new item spark joy?