Dostadning

My wife and I have been living in two different places for the past two years (it's a really long story and has a lot to do with the COVID-19 pandemic).  We moved to a new city about 2 years ago and decided to rent a condominium close to my work.  We kept our old house during this time and drove back and forth at least once a month.  We recently sold our house, and we are close to completing our transition to our new home and city.  It's an exciting time, even if a little bittersweet.

We've been packing up a lot of the furniture and personal belongings that didn't make the move to our new city.  Surprisingly, we still have a lot of things in our old house.  We've made several trips back and forth to our local Goodwill , and we've thrown a lot of old things out (thank you 1-800-Got-Junk? and our local trash company).  Notably, had we moved two years ago, I do not think we would have thrown as many things out or donated as many items to Goodwill.  I suspect that, in the interest of time, we would have just moved everything.

I made a comment to a co-worker that perhaps Marie Kondo could learn from our experience!  We told ourselves that, "If we haven't touched it for at least two years, it's probably time to donate or pitch it."  One of our daughters told us, "When in doubt, throw it out!"  My colleague at work told me, "You are just doing a Swedish death cleaning - it's called dostadning."  I am always curious to learn new things, so I searched for the word dostadning on the Internet.

The word dostadning apparently comes from two Swedish words - "do" meaning "death" and "stadning" meaning "cleaning."  As it turns out, my colleague was right, the word literally means "death cleaning."  There's even a book by Margareta Magnusson called, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.  The concept here is that you should declutter your life now, so that your family won't have to do it after you die (it's a little morbid, I realize, but the concept still makes a lot of sense to me).

Here's the thing, though.  Dostadning doesn't have to be just about decluttering the things at home.  We can and should metaphorically declutter the things we have accumulated in our professional lives too.  Every so often, we should take a good, hard look at the things that we do that keep us busy.  Are we spending our time and energy on activities that are going to make us better as individuals or that help us to achieve our goals?  If not, it's time to stop.  We should remove all the junk and the clutter, and focus our attention on the things that are important to us.

As Marie Kondo herself said, "From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change."  She was referring to tidying up your house, but I think she meant that we should tidy up our lives too.  Dostadning.