Clutter does not protect me. I feel at ease with a clutter-free mind and clutter free space.

Open the drawer with the cables in it. Chargers for two phones you no longer own, an adaptor for a country you visited once, a remote for a television that went to the tip in 2018.

None of that is really clutter. It is a drawer full of decisions you didn't make.

Each object gets picked up, considered for a second and a half, and put back — which is why clearing one room is exhausting out of all proportion to the physical work involved.

The protection on offer was always thin; nothing in there has ever been needed. The deferral was real, though, and what makes a cleared space feel light isn't the space. It is the absence of forty small pending questions.