Can things really bring you joy? I’m a Christian, I know what the “correct” answer to that question is supposed to be. But I also can’t deny that when I throw a leg over my motorcycle and fire up that V-Twin engine, it brings a smile to my face. Some t-shirts get pulled out of a drawer to an immediate grin. The piston and Dodgers pennant that have followed me from job to job across the country do so for reasons which have nothing to do with practicality.
The point is, some things do have the power to make us happy. True, they’re just possessions, and we can’t take them with us when we die, but some things truly have the power to enrich our lives, bring back happy memories, or otherwise increase our happiness. The trick is figuring out what those things are, and according to Marie Kondo, cutting out most of the other things in our lives that don’t meet those criteria.
I’m like most Americans. I have a lot of stuff. Thirty years of books and video games that have just sort of accumulated and travelled with me from place to place. Random piles of small objects that I swear must have a secret breeding program because there weren’t that many when I put them into the box. T-shirts accumulated from purchases, conventions, and giveaways over twenty years.
For anyone who’s seen at least one episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, the book that the show is based on won’t contain any major surprises. It’s more indepth than the show, and gets more into KonMari’s though process behind creating her system, but the basic idea of “discard everything* that doesn’t spark joy” is the same.
It’s also beautifully revolutionary. Americans as a whole are a consumption based culture. New! Latest! Best! If your TV isn’t 8k, it’s garbage! Buy a new one! In my side jobby at Marooners’ Rock, I’m inundated daily with new game announcements. Who has time to actually finish anything? A person could devote all of his or her waking hours to just playing new games starting with Monday’s new releases, and by Sunday they would have a backlog. We in the Western world are drowning in stuff.
The KonMari method promises an end to that. The most critical point of the book is not what you discard, it’s what you keep. It’s not about learning to perfectly fold shirts, limiting your books to a certain arbitrary number, or perfectly organizing every drawer in the bathroom. It’s the idea that once you have intentionally gone through a long, painful process of paring down your possessions, you will be much better attuned to make thoughtful decisions about what new things to allow into your life. It’s a life approach where Rose’s stupid line from the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi actually makes sense.
With my (lack of) free time, getting through all the steps in the KonMari process is going to take some time. I’m really hoping to attack the first step (clothing) during the Memorial Day weekend. In the meantime, I’m trying to implement at least little bits of the KonMari plan where I can. So far that has meant finding a small box into which I empty the contents of my pants pockets at the end of the day, getting a headstart on the clothing purge by only choosing shirts that “spark joy” while those that don’t are going into donate/toss/sell piles.
Stay tuned for future updates!