Most decluttering asks whether you need something. Kanso asks a different question, and it is a harder one to answer honestly. Not do you need it, but do you use it fully.
That is the whole practice in this article. One drawer, and one question, asked of each thing in it.
What kanso is asking
Kanso is usually translated as simplicity, and the translation loses the important half. The character for kan means simple. The character for so means plain, unadorned, the raw state of a thing before anything was added to it.
So kanso is not the absence of objects. It is the presence of objects that are being used all the way through. A knife that is sharpened and reached for every day is kanso. Four knives, of which one is used, is not, even though all four are perfectly good knives.
The Japanese minimalism guide describes kanso as discernment rather than deprivation. This article is about what that discernment feels like when you sit down and do it.
Choosing the drawer
Pick a drawer you open every day. The cutlery drawer. The one with pens and tape. The drawer beside the bed.
Not the junk drawer. That one is a different problem, and it will only teach you that you own a lot of things you forgot about. The point here is to look at objects you already think of as in use and find out whether that is true.
The sort
Take everything out and put it on a surface where you can see all of it at once.
Then make three piles, and be slower about it than feels necessary.
The first pile is for things you used this week. Not could use, not will use when the occasion comes. Used, in the last seven days.
The second pile is for things you used in the last month but not this week. This will be larger than you expect.
The third pile is for everything else.
Do not decide anything yet. The sort is the practice. The decisions come after, and they are easier than you think once the piles are in front of you.
What the piles tell you
The first pile is kanso. Those objects are being used fully. They go back in the drawer, and they go in the front.
The second pile is the interesting one. Look at each thing and ask why it was used once and not again. Sometimes the answer is that its use is monthly, and it belongs. Sometimes the answer is that a better tool exists in the first pile and you reached for that instead. The second kind is the one kanso is designed to catch: a perfectly good object that a better object has quietly replaced.
The third pile is not a discard pile. It is a pile of things you have not yet decided about. Some will be seasonal. Some will be the backup of something in pile one. Some will be objects you kept because throwing them away felt wasteful, which is a real feeling and not a foolish one.
And some will be objects whose whole job is to wait. The spare key. The torch. The medicine you hope not to need. These fail the frequency test and pass the kanso test, because a thing that is ready when it is needed is being used fully, even if that is once a year. Judge these by purpose, not by the week. They go back in the drawer, at the back, and they are not counted against you.
Putting the drawer back
Return pile one to the drawer, in the front. Return the monthly-use items from pile two behind them.
The rest goes in a box, dated, somewhere out of the way. Not the bin. A box. Give it three months. If you open the box for something in that time, it earned its place back. If you do not, you will find it much easier to let go of a box of things you have not thought about than a drawer of things you were looking at every morning.
That delay is not a trick. It is the difference between deciding from principle and deciding from evidence.
Why one drawer
You could do the whole kitchen. People do. The reason to start with one drawer is that kanso is a way of seeing, and a way of seeing has to be learned on something small enough to see.
After one drawer, you will notice it in the next one without being asked to. That is the disposition Japanese minimalism is after, and it does not arrive from a weekend of tidying. It arrives from having once looked closely enough to tell the difference between a thing you own and a thing you use.
Where this fits
Kanso is one of the four ideas in the guide to Japanese minimalism. Ma is the space between things, and the Empty One Surface practice works on that. Danshari is the older discipline of refusing what comes in, and the Doorway Test is its two-week version. Kanso is what you do with what is already here and already in use.
Three practices, three angles on the same room.
A free two-week sheet. Kanso works on what is already in the drawer. Danshari works on what is about to come through the door. The Doorway Test gives you the three questions to ask there and fourteen lines to record what you decided. You get it by email, free. → Get the free sheet
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This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: