I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Surely you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, and her KonMari organizing and decluttering method. But have you heard of Hideko Yamashita’s Danshari philosophy?
Danshari brings together three concepts:
- Dan – to refuse unneeded things from entering your life
- Sha – to dispose of or discard things that no longer serve you
- Ri – to separate and detach yourself from the desire and emotional attachment to material things
From the description for Yamashita’s book Danshari: The Japanese Art of Decluttering Your Space to Transform Your Life:
At its heart, Danshari is about release. It’s about removing what no longer serves you emotionally as well as physically. Discarding clutter frees you from outdated beliefs and emotional burdens that are holding you back. The word Danshari literally means “reduce, release and relieve”—or, in other words, lightness, clarity and freedom.
With Danshari, instead of asking “where should this go?” or “does this object spark joy?” you ask “is this necessary for my life right now?”
I like this idea a lot, because when I’ve tried to declutter recently I’ve come up against emotional resistance. For example, I’ve been unable to give up my guitar and guitar music because it seems valuable to me, and it represents a person I once was. Could it help to begin eliminating things that are not necessary to my life right now, and eventually work my way around to emotionally heavy objects like the guitar?
And what about activities?
I am thinking of applying Danshari ideas to the activities I do. What is necessary right now? And what can I either refuse to let enter my life, or discard? More important, and more difficult, how to detach my identity from the activities and things of my life that no longer serve me?
In clinging to my guitar and guitar music, or to activities in my current life that are likely ready to pass out of it, I’m making my self too fixed. I’m making the idea of me and mine the active concept. Making things and activities mine and making their status as mine the most operative concept creates clinging and craving, and an unwillingness to watch experience (of things, of activities, of relationships) come and go.
Here’s where the Buddhist idea of not-self can help. This doesn’t mean there is no self. Instead, it means that by putting down the idea of a fixed and important self, you can reduce dukkha, that feeling of disharmony with your ever-evolving life.
In Being Somebody and Nobody Part 3 of 5: The Skillful Self, Ines Freedman says mindfulness shows us we have many selves, almost like a committee, with different members dominating depending on conditions: “maybe the controller, the perfectionist is at play, the pleaser, the critical parent, the judge, the fearful one, the playful child, the bratty child, the angry one, the smart one.”
She says of our internal committee members:
[One] of the great gifts of practice is that we begin to see them not as fixed identities, but as habit patterns…. conditioned ways that the mind organizes itself.
Turning towards life’s unfolding and away from fixed notions of the self and how your life should be, that makes you more open to what is happening at any given moment. Then, Freedman says, “confidence becomes less about self-image and more about just being available, available to life, to joy, to sorrow, to uncertainty.” You can be “equally at ease being nobody, going nowhere, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”
I’m going to share again the short poem from a thirteenth century Zen master that Freedman ends her talk with, because it is so beautiful and so appropriate to my musings today about letting go of what is no longer needed right now:
Spring has its hundred flowers, autumn its moon. Summer has its cooling breezes, winter its snow. If your mind is not clouded by pointless things, this is the best season of your life.