I never met an organizing book I didn’t like. So when I bumped into the best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I couldn’t wait.
I grabbed it from the bookstore shelf and inhaled it with a cup of coffee in the café.
According to Marie Kondo, the Japanese clutter-clearer who wants to change my life, this obsession could mean only one thing.
I was “led by fate” to read her book.
“Wow!” I told anyone who would listen (mostly my husband), “This is radical!”
In it, Kondo describes the KonMari Method of organizing, which basically requires you to discard or donate any possessions you do not love and do it all at once. No one-drawer-at-a-time stuff. No “maybe” piles. No bag or two on the front porch for Kidney Services to pick-up. Clutter-clearing is an all-or-nothing, big-deal “event.”
“Ha!” my husband exclaimed. “I’ll bet people either love everything they have, or love nothing. So book or no book, you end up keeping it all, or throwing it all out.”
“Not so simple, “I told him. “You have to actually hold each item and see if it gives you a thrill. That’s after you dump all your clothing in the middle of the floor.”
I could see a slightly panicked glaze in his eyes, imagining that our living room was about to look like the bedroom of a teenage girl.
Fortunately for him, I delayed mega-dumping till I’d picked through more KonMari instructions. They were mind-bending.
T-shirts, for example. According to Kondo, who believes clothes have feelings, they should not be folded and stacked. For one thing, it’s exhausting to be the bottom shirt. And for another, you might forget you even have it. So it’s important to store shirts vertically. The kicker is we’re not talking about hangers here. You have to store shirts vertically in the drawer.
To test-drive this, I decided to fling the T-shirt contents of an entire drawer on the bed and try to fold them so they could stand up by themselves.
“I’m a failure!” I proclaimed, as one shirt after another fell on its side. But YouTube came to the rescue. A video showed how to tuck all the parts neatly into a little rectangle that could stand at attention when the tees were stacked vertically against each other. Same with sweatshirts, hoodies, underpants and slacks.
For a fleeting moment, I considered grabbing every article of clothing I own and dumping/loving/folding. But I knew my compulsive self would not be able to stop and I had a meeting in an hour. So I settled on socks and corralled every pair (and half pair) I owned and test-drove the KonMari Method on this one little category of clothing. It was frightening.
In just 40 minutes, I had fallen out of love with 38.5 pairs and in love with 34, which were now unknotted (socks can’t breathe when they’re knotted) and vertically filed according to weight and season. I could not stop admiring them. It was as heady as the day I alphabetized the spices. Wow!
My mind was already racing ahead to the next category for dumping – shoes? underwear? slacks? – when the phone rang. And, as fate would have it, Kidney Services was on the line.
Could I leave a bag on the front porch?
“Sure,” I said. And possibly 199 more – down the sidewalk and then the driveway. Now that I have a deadline, the prospects are both terrifying and exciting, and I can’t decide.
T-shirts next? Or 20.5 pairs of shoes?
Copyright 2016 Pat Snyder
