Just adorable
What an adorable book. The shape and feel of the book itself
is cute, and the person telling her story about being a lifelong (and I mean
LIFE LONG) tidying enthusiast, and all her little hints for how to approach
your things, they’re just adorable. Or maybe the word I’m looking for is refreshing
– her voice and the ways Japanese culture show through in what she writes were
totally charming to me. Anyway, here is my plan for putting my house in order,
as prescribed by tidying expert Marie Kondo:
Discard things that don’t spark joy. Pick up each thing,
hold it in your hand and ask “Does this spark joy?” and if not, get rid of it. Discard
first before storing.
Order of discarding
Go by category of thing, in this order, and do all the
things in each category at once:
Clothes
– Books – Papers – Komono (odds & ends) – Sentimental items – Photos.
I’m relieved that there’s an order to go in for this, from
least emotionally draining to most. Komono has its own order:
CDs,
DVDs – skin care products – makeup – accessories – Valuables (passports, credit
cards, etc. – electrical equipment – household equipment (sewing kit,
stationery, etc.) – household supplies (medicine, detergent, other expendables)
– Kitchen goods and food supplies – Other (spare change, figurines, etc.)
Items
related to a hobby are their own subcategory
Papers
Keep only the things that spark joy! Because of this rule,
Kondo recommends throwing away just about all papers, and then having only a few
files that are very broad in scope. I don’t know – can I go there?
Timeline
Kondo says the best approach is putting your house in order
in one go, which is to say, over the course of about 6 months, tops. It sounds
like she often goes into peoples’ houses to help them with tidying and helps
them throw away 30-40 bags of trash in a single day.
Relating to things,
storing things
When
Kondo goes into a house to help someone put their house in order, she first
kneels down on the floor for a couple of minutes to thank the house for the way
it supports and shelters the people and to ask for its help in deciding where
to store things. She recommends keeping all objects of the same type in the
same place and not spread out in any way, and each person gets one space for
their storage. Types of things should be pretty broad, like, “electric” or
“paper-like” and not sorted by when they would be used. When she’s not sure
about where something should go, she will ask the house where it believes the
thing should go, and then she puts it there.
Storing clothes
Kondo believes strongly in vertical storage, not flat
stacks, and recommends a particular method of folding that causes the things
that are folded to stand up vertically in a drawer. That way, when you open the
drawer, you can see all your options. (She also sorts these folded clothes by
color - dark in back to light up front.) She recommends hanging things in a
closet in such a way that the largest, heaviest items are on the left and the
lightest items are on the right.
Discarding
As she
discards things, Kondo touches and holds each thing one at a time to see if it
sparks joy for her. Then, if not, she treats the moment as an opportunity to
thank the things for what they’ve done for her and meant to her. If she is
discarding a gift, she thanks it for conveying the sentiments of the giver. If
it’s an outfit she thought she’d like but didn’t, she thanks it for helping her
learn more about herself. The act of discarding is like a celebration or a
graduation, so Kondo dresses up for the occasion, usually wearing a dress and a
suit jacket.
The bottom line
The
bottom line is this: if you want to have a tidy house and be surrounded by
things you love, get rid of all the stuff that you don’t love, that’s just
sitting there being only partially useful and taking up valuable space and
mental energy. Give thanks for and celebrate each thing, then let go of all but
the ones that you love. And then you’ll be surrounded only by things you love.
Kondo believes there will be a moment when something clicks and you know you
have the right amount of things.
Developing a skill
Another way of describing her approach is that
by touching each of our things, holding it in our hands and making a decision
about whether we really love it, we develop the skill of knowing ourselves and
what we love better and better. The discarding gets progressively harder, but
then so does our skill at discarding.
I am excited about this
I am
super excited to put this into practice. Thanks to an unfortunate circumstance
in our basement, I already have a head start on discarding books – there is a
trunk full of books in my car that are on their way to the Book Thing very,
very soon.
Book Thing - hilarious pictures
(Check out the Book Thing’s website – they have a hilarious set of
pictures of real books they’ve gotten. http://www.bookthing.org/
Things like Don Knotts explaining how to lay bricks, or how to be a gun runner
for fun and profit.)
Dreams
I’m hoping this will
be a start to a new way of life in the near future. An intermediate goal is to have fewer of those
dreams where I suddenly realize there is a vast storage space in my house that
I hadn’t realized was there before.
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