On KonMari
Thinking about moving, and slightly intimidated by the prospect of putting 46 mini-USB cables, twelve souvenir mugs, three pairs of pliers, six sets of bedding (and so on very much ad nauseam) in the right box when packing time came, I wanted to find that balance for which I had no word.
And so I came, as inevitably as the change of season, to Marie Kondo and _The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up_, a master’s thesis on supporting the refuse and recycling industry in these Unprecedented Times.
Booking out an entire weekend, I dutifully read and reread, followed along in order, and am now 80% done and starting to form my first conclusions.
A wise old friend remarked that “she’s done very well to turn a mental illness into a career,” and it’s true that I found myself inescapably reminded of the “godspoken” Han Qing-jao in Orson Scott Card’s _Xenocide_, rigidly working out her obsession at great cost. (Incidentally, Card has had some pretty unpleasant things to say about LBG folks, so if you want to follow the reference up you may wish to buy second-hand.)
Kondo’s intense relationship to objects and spaces reads foreign to me, that’s true. I can’t say, lacking reference, whether that’s a cultural or psychological difference, although her success in her native Japan suggests it is specific to her. Her gift though is to lend you, for a little while, a taste of her mind, to let you run, as it were, a little Marie Kondo simulator right inside your own skull.
Illuminated in the monochrome light of an overpowered pathetic fallacy, what I owned began to look different. Instead of engaging my default reaction to what I owned - a mixture of vague sentimentalism, outsized emphasis on preparation for every eventuality (“But what if I need to steam broccoli for twenty people one day?”) and a concerning apparent belief that hiding things in cupboards was a useful behaviour, I found surprising technicolour shadows of memory and emotion cast by even mundane hunks of plastic and cardboard.
My Kondo-simulation suggested that having 46 mini-USB cables was not necessarily rational. That some mementos are treasured and needed, and that some are spent, their job done. That some paperwork is essential and that the vast bulk of it is there to manage my nervousness about the future and my own capability. That the job of some books is to sit with me forever in my mind, and of others is simply and as importantly to let me know that I will not, do not need to, read them. (A very serious and deeply literary author, academic and librarian, who had made his whole life from books, once told me that if a book didn’t grab me, I should move on: there was no shortage of books in the universe and it was a shame to get stuck on one you didn’t enjoy. I wish I’d listened.)
All of which is to say that I don’t own now most of what I owned last week.
I could expatiate on the benefits: less “noise” makes for a calmer home, a clearer mind, fewer “oh shit” tidying moments when friends call in. “A place for everything, and everything in its place” means, one hopes, never tidying again, because there’s never anything to tidy when things naturally live where they belong. I’m no longer carrying around a sophisticated n-dimensional model mapping possession to location. How nice.
But I am flush with first-days enthusiasm. The summer heat is waning and there is an energising freshness in the air. Will this all last? Have I found the language of the middle ground, or have I lurched from one negative to another, opposite negative? Of course I hope not, but I like others want to see evidence rather than aspiration.
If there is a long-term change, here’s my prediction of the causes.
* having easy places for things to go recruits entropy to your mission. Tidy is the low-energy state to which things revert
* a little bit of mini-Marie, a splinter of object-consciousness (this is too grand, isn’t it) keeps running. The decisions you make are now positive in tone (“This delights me and I wish to keep it, here”) instead of negative (“I suppose I ought to chuck some of this out. What can I get rid of?”). This is a little trickle of encouragement in itself.
* the bulk clear out, reminiscent of GTD, succeeds in graving new decision pathways in your mind so these decisions are easier in future.
So no new language. “This sparks joy” is not flexible enough, or normal enough, to be that happy resting place between “austere” and “overwhelming.” But then, what joy would that new language itself spark? I’m not about to go on tidying and discarding lecture tours. The joy is the changed life, not discussing it at dinner parties, at which I am already a sufficiently intensaholic bore.
Then let this be the last word from me on the subject: “enough.”
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