The Time of Our Lives by Robert Dessaix

Author:Robert Dessaix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brio Books
Published: 2020-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Yutori

A beautiful old age is impossible if you don’t clean up your clutter: clutter kills—cluttered time, cluttered space. Apart from anything else, it triggers cancer, Alzheimer’s and irritable bowel syndrome. I read it in a newspaper in a teahouse near the Sultan’s palace. Was it the Jakarta Post? I would swear by the Jakarta Post. The article was by an Englishwoman who’d read an article about how clutter kills by someone else in another newspaper altogether. Without a moment’s hesitation, this Englishwoman had hired a professional declutterer to empty out her house. Now she had not just no juicer or batik tablemats, but no books, no CDs, no bread-making machine, no Mother’s Day cards from her children and only one plate per family member.

It sounded pretty good to me (especially the bit about the bread-making machine), if a touch extreme. Was there a middle way? I’m partial, naturally, to middle ways. Couldn’t I ditch the Royal Doulton dinner-set, for instance, but keep the djellaba I bought in Fez? Just to bring back memories of the bazaar. And does Dostoyevsky have to go? I can’t imagine ever deciding to reread him, I don’t like being hectored, but a civilised bookshelf should have Crime and Punishment on it.

‘Of course there’s a middle way,’ said the man sitting across from me when I mentioned what I’d just been reading. Young but already gaunt. Appealing. German? ‘It’s called yutori. Have you heard of it?’ I hadn’t, of course. ‘Yutori is the new mindfulness but much more fun. You should try it.’ A smile I liked—not mindful at all.

‘Why? What is it?’ And, for that matter, I thought, why am I always the last person to hear about these things? I’d only just got a grasp on wabi-sabi, and now here was this new sensation from Japan that makes embracing imperfection old hat.

‘I doubt there’s a single word in English to cover it,’ he said, stabbing another prawn.

‘There often isn’t,’ I said, ‘look at “Blitzkrieg”, but we usually get the picture. Tell me more.’

‘This table,’ he said, ‘is an example of what it is not.’ I eyed the clutter crammed onto the table-top between us: cups, glasses, dishes of uneaten food, paper napkins, bottled water, tiny saucers of sambal as well as my copy of the Jakarta Post. ‘As is this whole warung, by the way, everyone jammed in cheek by jowl like this.’

‘Aha,’ I said.

‘Yutori means not being cramped.’ I could hardly remember not being cramped by something—desire, obligation, schedules, goodness. ‘It means having the time and space—and even the resources—to do, with a sense of ease, whatever it is you’d like to do. Plus a bit. That’s the important part: plus a bit.’

What flashed into my mind immediately was the sort of scene every episode of Grand Designs finishes with: a couple with children called Granville and Clementine, sitting in an aircraft-hangar-sized atrium, staring up at floor upon floor of bedrooms, boudoirs, bathrooms and walk-in closets reached by a hand-crafted spiral staircase, looking trapped.

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