Lost and found: The art of giving up and holding on

Over time, I have figured out how to make it work: By asking a question. Have I used this thing in a year? Is it any longer age appropriate? Does it add any value, practical or sentimental? If the answer to these is no, then the object gets left behind.

Can this be recycled/resold/gifted? Would someone else find this more useful? Is it attracting dust/insects/the neighbourhood crow? Is it occupying more space than needed? If the answer to these is yes, the object has to go. I do have occasional regrets—like when I gave my favourite “When life gives you lemons, add vodka and soda to it” T-shirt to the vegetable seller.

One habit I also developed—which helped in the above process—is to thoroughly analyse everything that comes into the house. Every purchase is made on a need-only basis. Rare gifts that may not be useful go to the nearest needy person—or the spouse.

Negotiate Space

While packing/unpacking, you discover long lost belongings that you might want to make better use of in the future. I discovered my missing A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole during one such move and moved it from the back to the front of the shelf where it lies today, still unread. But atleast I see it often, making a mental note to read it, before the ageing mind gets distracted by the seventh rerun of True Lies.

You get a second chance to rearrange your home—moving the reading desk for daylight, finding a careful place for the remote control, getting the lamps and paintings in the right places and negotiating unobstructed cross ventilation. How you arrange your home makes a difference to how you feel in those spaces—I found a place under a window for my meditation because I liked the light to come from behind me. Light from the front tends to wake me.

It’s the right time to get the carpenters, plumbers and electricians into action—or as sometimes the case, the same chap can do multiple activities. I once nicknamed a handyman “three-in-one”, which he didn’t like and fixed the sink at a 70-degree angle.

One of the best solutions to boredom at home is to rearrange stuff—its best to put your belongings in such a way that you can change their positions periodically.

Ultimately, there are benefits to continuity and also change. You don’t want to suddenly trip over a suitcase on the way to the loo in the middle of the night. But you also want to analyse when something is not working. For example, the futon in front of our TV has such a lumpy mattress that it constantly feels like I am sitting on a turtle—particularly because the lumps tend to move. I just turn the mattress over once in a while, with the added benefit of the cleaner side becoming visible.

What makes a house a home? You do. With some help from materialistic things, but more important than the possessions is how you interact with them. 

Mumbai-based Arun Janardhan is an independent writer-editor who writes on lifestyle, personalities and sports. He has lived in over 30 houses across seven cities.