Have you ever eaten a meal with someone who savors each bite? Where, watching them eat almost translates into a palpable sense of vicarious delight at each morsel of food they put in their mouth?
I remember once when I was growing up, this girl at camp – an older and wiser girl, who was kind of bawdy and beautiful, was like that. I was lucky enough to have her in my cabin. When we would go to the cafeteria each day, she would head straight for the salad bar (back when salad bars were so a thing). She would mound that beige little plastic plate high with salad and ranch dressing and then top it off with a hefty dose of bacon bits. Those super crunchy, not-actually-bacon kind of bacon bits. And then she would sit down and just go to town on that salad – crunching through it with big unladylike forkfuls, mmmming and yumming about her awesome salad. The way she plowed through that salad made bacon bits seem so delicious to me. Even now, when I think about bacon bits, I think of her and how delicious some crunchy bacon bits would be on my next salad.
All that is to say that the author of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing , Marie Kondo is to tidying what camp girl was to bacon bits. Kondo makes tidying seem downright delightful. And reading an entire book (it’s actually a pretty small book) about tidying has cast some kind of magic spell over me – just like the title says.
If you think that a book dedicated to the topic of tidying sounds like a day at the dentist, think again. In Kondo’s innocently adorable, passionate way, she challenges the way we typically think of our stuff — as chore-ful things that build up, spread out and multiply – and therefore as things that must be maintained and organized on a regular basis.
The real secret of Kondo’s book, while providing tangible instruction on organizing, discarding and folding, is that she is subtly changing how we think about our things. Kondo takes you from thinking of your things as just piles of random stuff, to thinking of your possessions as cherished – as instruments of joy and objects of gratitude. This shift in thinking allows you to let go of those things that don’t bring you joy (which, I can guarantee are plentiful), and instead, appreciate and keep neat, the things you choose to keep.
This, in turn, allows you to become aware of how your possessions actually make you feel; how your possessions represent you as an individual, and ultimately honing your ability to know and trust yourself enough to be in charge of your own life and what things you choose to be part in it.
Sounds kinda crazy to get all that from a book about tidying, doesn’t it? But I’m telling you, not only is the book actually an interesting and easy read, but it is life-changing in many ways. My husband even read it and it’s starting changing the way he processes certain things (what’s that?…Angels singing?). Read it, you’ll see.