Is it true that how you acquire, keep, and shelve your books is a reflection of how you maintain friendships? Can a properly folded pair of socks improve your relationship with siblings and parents?
Before you dive down the Netflix rabbit hole and bingewatch Marie Kondo’s hit series on tidying up, check out the book that sparked the joyful spiritual transformation inherent to tidying up.
Kondo, Marie. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Trans. Cathy Hirano. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2014. Print.
Genre: nonfiction
Summary: Tidying coach and expert Marie Kondo shares in this book the top-secret techniques she normally teaches one-on-one to clients paying top-dollar. Throughout, she defies conventional wisdom and practice so that the act of tidying up can be done only once in your life and never again. And, if you follow instructions carefully, you might just tidy up your soul, too.
Critique: Did you notice how the title of this book sort of repeats itself? Much of the text will do that, too. Many paragraphs will feel not like a progression of thoughts, but more like multiple iterations of the same sentence. I chalk this up to the difficulties inherent in translating — supremely demonstrated in this snippet from RadioLab.
Besides the repetition, the first fifty pages or so feel like the cousins of a Popeil infomercial. Kondo beats a steady drum to advertise that these methods are hers, hers alone, perfected over decades, beginning when she was but a tweenager obsessed with lifestyle magazines, and that she has trademarked these techniques as the KonMari method. (And in case you couldn’t figure out the etymological roots of that mysterious moniker, she tells you: it is her name, flipped and abbreviated. Well played, Ms. Kondo. Well played.)
I promise I am not merely quibbling over this book’s minor flaws and quirks. My hope is that if you know about these flaws in advance, you will smile at them and then read the book all the way through. Because you should. Kondo has an uncanny way of rooting out why we hoard, why we clutter, why we stockpile, why we acquireandacquireandacquire, how these habits hurt us emotionally, and why our repeated attempts to clean up and get organized ultimately fail within a few months.
As I noted above, Kondo defies our conventional tidying habits. She might as well. They don’t work. But the real knock-out epiphany lurking in her methods is not just its originality. Kondo links the way we treat our home and our stuff to the ways we treat the people in our lives. (Especially ourselves.)
Is it true that how you acquire, keep, and shelve your books is a reflection of how you maintain friendships?
How does a properly folded pair of socks improve your relationship with siblings and parents?
Can you really find true love (or better treasure your soul’s mate) by giving an honorable farewell to old mementos?
Will a tidy home actually make you a more joyful person?
These questions may seem innocuous. Inane. Insane? But when it comes to finding enduring happiness, the questions are as worth the asking as the methods are worth the trying. I mean, heck, think about it. What if all that’s keeping us from experiencing joyous and fulfilling lives is a poorly folded pair of socks?
jenny mason 