The worst: family mementos that you feel an obligation to preserve, but that you don’t actually personally care about.Piles of posters, Playbills, ticket stubs.The problem with not making decisions about what you want to do with these things (aside from not achieving that fabulous clean, minimal look) is that many of these things also represent jobs, to-dos.
But they are your memory in concrete form, and that’s a tough one.
#I like to tidy up full
But that’s what our lives are full of: things saved in case we’ll need them, which represent a kind of fear of the future (at minimum: you don’t want to have to find or buy them again), and things saved because of nostalgia for what they represent about your past. She doesn’t sound like she sees these as valid reasons not to throw it all away. In a kind of throw-away passage at the end of the book, Kondo offers an explanation for why it can be hard to part with things: They represent either an attachment to the past, or a fear of the future (or both). Who doesn’t want that? But deciding what’s important and what isn’t, what to keep and what to toss, is not only about what “sparks joy.” I get the appeal: Kondo promises that everything you own will fit inside whatever storage you happen to already have, that you’ll achieve clear, open, minimal space. I’ve had real experiences with “tidying up” recently-cases that don’t even approach the rigorous standard of the KonMari method, but that nonetheless made clear to me that Kondo’s ideas are deeply problematic when applied to the messiness of everyday lives. Why “tidying up” is a lot more complicated than it sounds (That’s a fraction of the result of 2 moves from 2 cities-on different continents). Well, let’s take a look at my living room as of 2 weeks ago. Anyone who compulsively dries their shampoo bottles clearly does not have enough to do.īut, real talk, why was I reading Kondo months after that class ended, months after I’d made a note to myself that I needed to read the book so I could respond intelligently to students? Why now, of all times? And Marie Kondo? This is a lady who recommends stowing your shampoo bottles in a cabinet after your shower so you don’t have to look at them, because, after all, you dry them off after your shower anyway, don’t you? I mean, if you don’t, they’ll be all…damp. I have 25 year old clothes I’ve worn once in the last 5 years. There are way way way way too many books. I have a basement full of tools I rarely use and buckets of cut off bits of case molding (you know, for doors and windows?), you know, just in case. Let’s get this straight: I’m not a minimalist. Some of my students resisted, conflating what I was asking them to do with Kondo’s radical minimalism. She’d come up multiple times as I was running my course, the Creative Focus Workshop, especially when students were frustrated with me because I asked them to out all their previous commitments by cleaning their desks (among other things). Well, a few weeks ago I finally caved and read Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. What does creative focus even mean? And can you learn it from a book about decluttering?
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