In Gretchen Rubin’s excellent book The Happiness Project, she writes about adopting a friend’s practice of keeping an empty shelf:
I was struck by the poetry of this resolution. An empty shelf! And she had three children. An empty shelf meant possibility; space to expand; a luxurious waste of something useful for the sheer elegance of it. I had to have one. I went home, straight to my hall closet, and emptied a shelf. It wasn’t a big shelf, but it was empty. Thrilling.
There’s something appealing in this idea. A kind of organizational zen koan. The shelf that offers nothing but potential.
But for most of us, finding a shelf to empty might be a challenge. Keeping it empty even more so. Empty space requires defending and monitoring, at least initially.
In my house, the kitchen table is the clutter hotspot — the place where miscellaneous items go to roost, where things get set down for a moment and forgotten for days. After a while, we stop noticing what’s sitting there. Clearing that table always produces a blissful opening up of the energy of the room, and of the whole house, since the kitchen is its heart center.
And for a few hours or days after it’s clear, we are newly aware of that spaciousness, and keep it free of stray items. A quick two-minute pickup each day is all it takes to keep it clear. But then life happens, our attention goes elsewhere, and the table fills up with stuff again.
Keeping a hotspot clear is different from clearing an empty shelf in a cupboard or closet. I’m coming to see it as a kind of ongoing mindfulness practice that can focus my awareness of both the clutter and the emptiness. Learning to see what actually is, separate from my judgments about how it should be.
I like the idea of the empty shelf as a kind of talisman, shining emptiness inside of a closet. My kitchen table will never be as always-empty as that shelf. But that’s what it has to teach me.