Changing time

Appreciating having it, and not feeling the pressure to acquire. Really exceptionally rambly.

It’s been cold this past week. Winter is Rome is mainly delightfully cold and crisp and sunny, but every so often it gets briefly cold cold, and it feels as though the buildings just can’t warm their bones.

But in any case, its almost the end of January, and here’s my main takeaway from less than a month of a general no-buy, and almost six months of a clothes one (and one I’ve mentioned before): I have the luxury of time.

Working through my winter wardrobe, I notice things and make mental notes. I could use some more light layers for under sweaters: I have some old ones that could be replaced. This winter I’m fine with what I have, though. I’d like a mid-weight jacket or cardigan for next autumn, and/or a cotton sweater but I’ll tough out spring with linen shirts I already have. More linen pants would be useful in the future, but I’m all set for next summer. I wear quite a lot of cropped wide-legged trousers in winter, and I wouldn’t mind a few more pairs of knee-length warm socks to go under them but I’ll work with what I’ve got for now.

None of these feel like frivolous wants, but I can wait for them, which means I can decide that I will only buy from small, sustainable brands, and I have time to research them properly (I will probably only buy knitwear from here and here, linen is always from here).

For my apartment, I’d like to finally get some plants (and cache pots!), I need to organise my storage and get some more of it. I could (should) upgrade my curtains. Should I get one of those herb planters with lights built in (my apartment is dark)? Do they work? If I keep on entertaining more, another table cloth would be nice, as well as cloth napkins and more aesthetically pleasing trivets for hot dishes. I would really like a big ottoman instead of my beautiful spiky coffee table.

I romanticise the hell out of my life. I match my morning coffee cup to my tea cup. I decant yoghurt out of its container into a little beaker. I could go on. There is always the temptation to upgrade everything.

I don’t HAVE TO buy any of the above, and indeed, even without a no-buy, all available money is going on more urgent things. But because I can’t buy them, instead of feeling frustrated, I feel liberated. I pride myself on not being an impulse-buyer, on thinking about the stuff I buy. But I realise at times like this that I still rush the process. And this time, I absolutely have time to think about what I want, how I’m going to use it, and where I’m going to get it from.

I love this feeling of no pressure! My apartment has no built in storage (most Italian homes don’t) so I really need to take a hard look at what I’m storing and how I do it. My next move will definitely be a downsize, and I’m glad about that. I don’t want to empty out my present generously sized apartment, but I want to look at what I’m keeping just because I have space to do that.

I don’t need to be fully amped up for all hobbies, particularly when I’m not indulging in any of them right now. I’m donating my dressmaker’s dummy, and I’ll keep the sewing machine but it no longer needs to live in the living room near the table. I can streamline my sewing materials so that I just have a functional repair kit. I have art supplies I want to keep, but I can store them more efficiently. I have a great work basket where I keep all the yarn I actually use, so I need to go through abandoned projects and decide what their fate should be. I only ever use my little toolkit from IKEA instead of the crammed one shoved under my desk, and the only thing I ever miss from it is needle-nosed pliers, so that can be remedied. Pretty much all of these things that are surplus to requirements can find a home elsewhere, so I’m not throwing useful stuff away, and that should free up some storage space.

When I moved to this apartment, I took the small bedroom, which is now the dressing/spare room, and let my daughter have the bigger one, with the proviso that the rest of the spaces were mine. The rest of the spaces immediately filled up with teenagers, but I somehow managed to function in my tiny room. The only way I could get a small double bed into it was to have an extra-tall, shallow wardrobe, which I have never replaced. This means that I don’t have a lot of actual wardrobe space, hence the reason the knitwear has its own cupboard, and most out of season clothes are stored in boxes. And yet, when I moved into the bigger room, I managed to keep the underneath of the bed free for a few years, despite having more clothes than I have now, and now it’s packed full of storage boxes. What the hell is in them?

(I keep staring at the question above, and I don’t know the answer to it off the top of my head. I think one has stuff like paint rollers, one definitely has art supplies, one has summer linen sheets and maybe a couple of others have summer clothes?)

I often say that I wish work me and home me were better aligned - work me is ferociously organised, and home me is … not.

The other evening the electrician came and changed various sockets/outlets, brought new bulbs and illuminated my hallway in terrifying detail, added a switch to the light that never turned off, and generally made my home safer and more functional. It cost a bit, and while obviously it’s better, there’s no romanticise your life/fun shopping pay-off. There’s an aesthetic streamlining in that not everything is now plugged into multiple adaptors - now they are plugged into white boxes protruding from the wall. I mean, it’s not aesthetic. It’s just tidier than before.

In the meantime while he was doing all this, and in between periodically being plunged into darkness, I did a first pass over some drawers, and managed to clear a bag full of stuff. Again, useful, but hardly glamorous.

I miss the fun bits of decluttering! The bit where you buy lots of containers to put things in and … oh wait, that’s not decluttering, is it? That’s just making the stuff you might need one day but maybe not this decade look cute. And the time has passed to store lino ink that may have dried up (I’ll take it in to school and see) and my carefully curated (obviously forgot all about it) Post-it collection. Also going in to school, the only place I actually use Post-its.

I’m committed to using the storage I already have. I am embracing the prosaic and mundane, in a tentative, arm’s length, face slightly averted kind of way. But! I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a careful reorganization of baskets in my linen cupboard to be deployed elsewhere, all of which hinges on whether two thin mattress-toppers will fold up and stay folded up quite small. Gosh, I can’t wait to find out if that will work. No, seriously, I really can’t wait.

They did! I did a full basket deployment, and felt smug, and then looked at what boxes of stuff could be shifted, un-looked at, from place to place, noticed I had zipped bags shoved hastily under the bed to make space for the guests, and immediately thought, “Oh! Those are ugly, I should get more boxes (because that would be the sensible thing to do!)” but I caught myself.

I started this no-buy (and unexpected decluttering extravaganza) knowing I had more than enough. I’m not buying because I don’t need more. Whatever is in the boxes and bags under the bed needs to fit into the boxes, and my aim would be to get the boxes out from under the bed eventually.

I had decided to do the household no-buy before the cat died, and I decided to do it because I felt I had enough stuff, and I wanted to see if I could save some money. Then, because my elderly sick cat is now dead, life changed, and one of the most fundamental ways it changed was that I started absent-mindedly decluttering. This has been useful because it has helped me identify stuff I should keep together and accessible so that I don’t think I’ve run out and buy more. And it’s been useful because it is starting to take over as a focus rather than the no-buy.

There is a part of me that is looking for the dopamine, part of me that says, “My cat died! I need a present!”, “I just spent all this money and all I got were some boring plugs!” so I am recognising that, and acknowledging how stupid it is, and moving briskly on.

But to get back to my initial point, what I do have, in abundance, is time. The decluttering is making me think about my belongings, not the things I’m redistributing, but the things I have and love. Sadly, not having to take a pet into consideration gives me a chance to move stuff around, and moving one delicate little bowl opens up the possibility of everything else. Maybe it’s also time to move around bits of furniture; because most of my stuff was acquired, it often masquerades as something else - a many drawered desk as a chest of drawers, or a chest of drawers as a side table, a desk as a dining table, a gate-leg dining table as a console - so pieces move from room to room, constantly reinvented. I can keep shifting and rediscovering things, and thinking about whether I will want to keep them forever, and if I do, what is their function? The big desk in the living-room used to hold all my art materials, but I don’t need it for that now - maybe it could take all the emergency supplies, sorted into categories?

I don’t need to make decisions now, I have plenty of time. This is the best bit, and what I keep reminding myself. There are no imperatives. I’m not going to get anything new, so I don’t need to have anything done by a certain date. Not that I intend on putting things off, but more than I don’t have to commit myself: it’s not that I would like THIS storage but I can get this other one from IKEA and be done with it, and I can go to IKEA on this date, or order on this one so I have to make decisions now and … No. I use what I have and consider what the best solution might be, when I’ve exhausted all the available ones, because I have all the time I need to do that. I have time to cycle through thinking about what I need, researching it, tracking it down, and then letting it sit there until I want it more than ever, or lose interest.

Decluttering my house on a household no-buy is different from decluttering my clothes on a no-buy. I didn’t declutter my clothes, because I reckoned if I wasn’t buying anything, that’s when I’d find out if the things I was hanging onto really would come in useful. I did give away some clothes, but they were things I already knew I wouldn’t wear again, and I had been waiting to find someone to give them to, rather than just get rid of them. I won’t declutter when the no buy is over, because I can see that my wardrobe is serving me well.

I was so looking forward to winter dressing up, but in mid-way retrospective mode, I can see that this winter is hard, and I have relied heavily on a very no-brainer, predominantly black or navy wardrobe: I’ve been applying the summer dressing fallbacks, what top? what bottom? and semi-mindlessly getting dressed. And I’m so grateful I have the clothes and accessories that let me do this, that still feel as though I’m representing me, while making minimal effort. (While I’m writing this paragraph, it’s a Friday morning after a week in which I started sick, with guests staying, barely slept one night, and then woke up this morning an hour late, having slept like the dead, realising that the black jeans I planned to wear were in the wash. I had to fly out of bed and into the shower, and throw on my clothes before my lift arrived. I’m wearing my trusty Grenson chelsea boots, some wide-leg black wool trousers, a chunky black cashmere sweater, and a patterned cashmere shawl, with some pretty ceramic earrings. I love what I’m wearing, and it’s comfortable and weather appropriate. I like the proportions, which are generous, with no attempt to balance them out. I could have carefully thought out this outfit instead of just grabbing it, and I could have swapped out any number of tops and bottoms, but I didn’t need to - I know my wardrobe contains things I love wearing and so even in autopilot, it has my back).

The mental notes I make aren’t random. If I see something pretty and think I’d like it, the thought flits in and out, I don’t keep hold of it, but I keep coming back to the same thoughts about things that would be useful later. I’m not spiralling into an obsessive cycle of deciding I need something, looking it up up online, comparing prices, worrying I’ll miss the sale, etc. My brain is already getting used to thinking in terms of needs not wants, and putting them into their future perspective. And because I’ve been practicing, it’s easier to do this across the board.