De-Cluttering Joy

The first step: “Tidy in one shot as quickly and as completely as possible.” This contradicts the generally adopted assumption that tidiness and organization is best achieved and maintained through consistent efforts every day, little by little – a major deterrent and a gruesome, tedious prospect that repels any lazy individual. Instead, Marie emphasizes the need to treat the decluttering process as a special event, ‘a festival,’ and to put yourself into an appropriately excited state of mind before indulging in it.

Next, “Sort by category not by location, and do it quickly.” When sorting your clothes, for example, take them all out and dump them all in a single pile. This, according to Marie, not only allows you to visually recognize just how much of something you have all at once, but also substitutes for the sporadic, half-hearted and ineffective attempts of cleaning isolated portions of a closet, shelf or room over an elongated period. Here, she offers a specific order to adhere to: Clothes, followed by books, then documents and miscellaneous items, and finally ‘mementos’ like heirlooms, old albums, and other memorable objects which are deliberately kept for the end to avoid the possibility of being lapsed into nostalgia and distracted from the process.

But most importantly, the distinctive feature of the method – also the one earning the most questioning looks and chuckles from the audience – is to keep what ‘sparks joy.’ When sorting between things you want to keep and those you want to throw away, Marie's approach is to ask yourself whether or not each object inspires happiness within you. “Make sure you touch it and imagine how your body reacts to it. If every part of your body lights up, keep it.” Such talk of caressing your books and clothes and then having your body converse with them is always received as highly amusing by incredulous listeners. But yet they are drawn to it, and many are inclined to give it a chance. It is worth exploring.

The people that reach out to her to help them declutter their spaces have often resigned to the mess and desperately seek to turn their lifestyles around. What they do not want to hear is a condescending judgement of their failure and a radical solution that is impossible to implement like purging the house of anything with no functioning value. Marie Kondo offers the opposite. She is said to judge the mess negatively and the people positively, engaging in personal conversations and getting to know the people she works with, their background and their lifestyle before giving decluttering advice, making her style widely accommodating and understanding.

Moreover, encouraging you to surround yourself with things that make you happy is a fun, subjective practice, rather than a sterile prescription. Contrary to the general opinion that when dealing with a mess, look for the things to get rid of, Konmari takes a slightly different tangent. "Tidying is about what you want to keep in your life, not what you want to eliminate." Taken from her website, this phrase aptly captures the positive outlook this woman is trying to outsource. Joy is personal. By basing her entire method on this fact, Marie made it an incredibly flexible and attractive package, rather than a one-size-fits-all.

Quarantine is a great opportunity to test it out for yourself. Before many of us boarded ourselves indoors, life was super-fast paced, and there was never time to sit down and revisit everything in our house and reevaluate how we felt about it. Now, more than ever, it is pertinent to surround ourselves only with objects that emanate positivity. So whether or not you embrace Marie Kondo's methods, they definitely offer a way of achieving that goal. By depending on us to draw from our emotions, notably happy emotions, we are forced to recall memories made with our belongings, relive experiences previously lived and discern their value in our lives.