My family bought a treadmill several years ago. Like many families, we enthusiastically used it for a few weeks before the novelty ran out. It slowly faded out of our lives; I can’t remember the last time someone worked up a sweat on it. But, we still use the treadmill. Now, it’s a mainstay in a part of my parent’s room, eternally folded up with an ever-changing pile of clothes stacked on top. If this treadmill wasn’t there, if we actively used it or if was stored away in a distant corner of the garage, where would those clothes go? Surely they wouldn’t be haphazardly thrown on the floor at the same square foot where the treadmill now stands. Instead, the clothes would likely either occupy their rightful spot in a closet or be folded over another fixture in our house.
The-clothes-on-the-treadmill phenomenon illustrates a peculiar principle: your possessions, especially furniture, can creep into your life in unexpected ways. An unused treadmill in a house will rarely stay that way. If you aren’t running on it, it is almost inevitable that you’ll pile something on top of it. The same thing happens if you put a side table next to your bed. Your intention could have been to use it as a place to hold your cellphone, a water bottle, and maybe a lamp. But, almost invariably, it’ll become a black box of things piled on top. Watches, medicine bottles, headphones, old snack wrappers; the possibilities are endless. The convenience invites usage. If the treadmill or the side table were removed, it’s likely that the clothes and miscellaneous objects would find different places. More intentional placement and increased organization would likely ensue.
Mastering this principle comes down to conscious usage of the things we own. I think putting more intention behind interactions with our possession will help us lead more organized and thoughtful lives. Here are three action-items that helped me.
Take monthly stock of your surroundings.
What’s your set-up looking like? Is something sitting in a corner unused or taking up a large amount of otherwise valuable real estate? Doing this with some frequency can ensure that you control your environment and your environment doesn’t control you. It’s scary how quickly a countertop can turn into a monstrous stack of papers. The key is to have a set time, maybe 30 minutes a month, to step back and take a look around.
Reposition your furniture.
My older brother comes back and forth every few weeks between his apartment in a different city and my parent’s home. Every time he comes, it seems like he has a new idea of how he wants his room and other places in our house to be configured. He’ll push his bed up to a different wall and his desk to another while displacing some drawers to the garage. I dread helping him move all of these heavy things but, to be honest, the results speak for themselves. Moving furniture around has resulted in some configurations that make the room feel significantly larger than it actually is. If you try this, you’re likely to get a room that, at the very least, has a nice fresh feel to it.
Eat on the floor, especially with friends.
This one’s oddly specific and, depending on your background, will come across as either ordinary or quite whacky. Growing up in an immigrant South Asian culture, sitting on a piece of large cloth while eating at a dinner-party was quite normal. It was an unwritten rule at every get-together; dinner time would arrive and, without words exchanged, the host would pull out a large cloth for the younger people to sit and eat on. I recently revisited this practice, but not out of cultural nostalgia. When I had friends over at my smaller Bay Area apartment, I pulled out a large cloth since I don’t have a proper dinner table. Unexpectedly, I found the social dinner experience to be much more pleasurable. The absence of a table made the space between us shrink. The dynamic was more intimate and relaxed; sitting criss-cross likewise added a fresh sense of novelty.
This isn’t to say that I’m going to constantly reposition my furniture or always eat on the floor. Instead, this slightly, yet significantly, altered my relationship with otherwise unobtrusive personal possessions. I’m more aware of the role a table can play in creating a vibe at dinner or how pushing a bed against the wall can make my room look incredibly vast. Conscious interactions with our larger possessions can change our relationships with our personal spaces.
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