NL: “Opgeruimd! de manier om orde en rust in je leven aan te brengen”
Why do you want to keep these ugly pink and black plaid note cards?
Because I might use them.
Really?
No.
Why do you want to keep this change purse?
It was a gift and I like it.
Really?
No.
Why do you have this packet of reading materials from college?
Because someday I might want to brush up on the history of the Russian intelligentsia.
Really?
No.
Marie Kondo has written an international bestseller: "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing". And life-changing is not an understatement. By the time you’ll have finished this book, your apartment will look organized, clutter-free and more importantly, you’ll be surrounded by only those things that sparkle joy. Which will ultimately make you a happier person.
Yes people, after being away from my blog for a while, I’m back, thanks to Marie Kondo. This Japanese “tidying guru” developed a method for cleaning and reorganizing your home that might be crazy and might be brilliant, but works either way. In any case, I found it to be important enough to share my findings with you through this blog.
Kondo’s philosophy is that you should only own things that you love, that everything else is just wasting both physical and emotional space. Although some of her advice can be eyebrow-raising, I decided to commit, following her advice to the letter two weekends ago.
She advises you start with your clothes. Kondo has you take every piece of clothing you own out of your closet and dresser and pile them on your bed. Then you pick up each item one by one and gauge your emotional reaction to it. Only items that “spark joy” in your heart when you’re holding them in your hands get to stay. As a result, now I have a closet that basically smacks me in the face with joy every morning.
Once you’ve done your clothes, you go through the rest of your possessions by category (not by space!) — books, then papers, toiletries, electronics, household goods, photos, and your kitchen. The joy meter becomes less relevant to some of these but the guiding principle remains the same. You consider everything you own item by item, and decide whether or not you have a compelling reason to keep it.
What I found truly interesting about this book is that she deals with all the pitfalls one can have when starting to discard stuff: books — “‘sometime’ means ‘never;’” papers — “discard everything;” gifts — “the person who gave it to you doesn’t want you to use it out of a sense of obligation, or to put it away without using it.” And so on.
As she explains, she’s been passionate about tidying since she was a child, staying in at recess to tidy the classroom instead of playing with other kids, reading lifestyle magazines, and getting in trouble for reorganizing her family’s closets. This lifelong, single-minded devotion to tidying has made her advice the best around, but also might have loosened her relationship to normalcy. I don’t follow her advice to kneel down and thank my apartment for keeping my possessions safe when I get home in the evening, for example, but I’m really glad I got rid of all the books and documents that I have been keeping for all this time.
Her book is not meant to tell you what you should keep or throw away but to be “a guide to acquiring the right mind-set for creating order.” It truly changes the way you look at your belongings, and I can only confirm that although you are throwing away things that you didn’t even know you had, you end up not only emptying your apartment, but also your head, leaving place for new experiences, without the past holding you back.
Kondo says that now that I’ve put my house in order I’ll probably find love and my dream job and lose 10 pounds, but while I’m waiting for that to happen my apartment looks great. This book will change your life.
