The late Akiko Ikeda, whom I deeply admire, once wrote in one of her books:
“Preparing for death begins the moment we are born.”
That line has stayed with me for a long time.
Only recently have I come to understand what it truly means—
to live with an awareness of death from the very moment life begins.
Around the same time, I began to wonder whether decluttering might be something similar.
But no—decluttering cannot begin at birth.
When we are young, it feels right to expand everything:
relationships, desires for possessions, even sexual desire.
We want to widen our lives, to hold as much as we can.
Decluttering, I think, is something we begin only after we start to see how we want to live—
and how we don’t.
The word “decluttering” once became a major trend,
but the real issue has always been timing.
I often hear advice like:
“When life becomes overwhelming, try cutting away unnecessary relationships.”
But sometimes, when life feels hardest,
it is precisely then that meeting more people can be the better choice.
In other words, decluttering may sound simple,
and it can certainly bring a sense of clarity—
but in practice, it may be a surprisingly advanced skill.
And when we add “preparing for death” to it,
the difficulty increases even further.
People sometimes joke self-deprecatingly about wanting to renounce the world or live in seclusion.
But doing that well seems almost as difficult as succeeding in the real world.
Half-measures may be forgiven for the successful,
but for someone who tries to abandon society,
they may only bring deeper suffering.
Why?
Because for ordinary people, consciously renouncing the world is nearly impossible.
You only have to look at the lives of Santoka Taneda, Hosai Ozaki, or Saigyō to understand how difficult such a life truly is.
To abandon things properly requires staking one’s life on it.
And the world that appears at the far end of decluttering and end-of-life preparation—
it is neither an enlightened world nor a happy one.
It is simply the drifting of a soul,
wandering through absolute solitude.
Which is to say—
this was written by Nakamura,
who recently attempted a combined experiment in decluttering and end-of-life preparation,
and failed spectacularly.
“The things we hesitate to discard—
that hesitation itself
is the flower of being alive.”
