The KonMari Method

Organization - something we all have a bit of a love/hate relationship with. I love seeing things organized. I hate doing the work. I go through periods where I organize the crap out of everything and it usually all falls apart at some point.

Apparently this is common, according to Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo. She wrote a best selling book called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I just bought after going a Google search on the term 'life changing'.

I know how to organize things, and I know how to purge - but according to Ms. Kondo, there is a better - in fact a best - way to do it. It involves a lot of rules that I won't go into here, but the main concept is about getting rid of things that don't bring you joy [or that are not useful - ie - your tax returns may not bring you joy, but you can't really get rid of them.]

So I spent today implementing the parts of her design that make sense to me and discarding the parts that don't [for instance she empties her purse every night and puts everything in it away somewhere. - Normal people don't do that. The reason you have a purse is so that all the things you need if you have to leave the house in a hurry are in ONE PLACE. Separating them is cute until you have to run out in an emergency and have to waste precious time collecting your wallet from under the bed. Let's get real people.] Aside from that, she makes a lot of sense.

Today I purged bags of useless clothes from my closet, organized my shoes, cleaned out my art supplies and dealt with the mind-numbing, depression causing mountain of paperwork that I hate to file and can't get rid of. Turns out I CAN get rid of most of it and now I don't have to keep every scrap of paper that comes down the pike.

I feel lighter.

I feel less stressed and for the first time in weeks, I'm not weary and in pain. I'm not sure the KonMari method can take credit for all of that, but I think it helped.

I also wrapped Christmas presents ,believe it or not and purged a lot of the Christmas crap I've been keeping forever because I 'hated' to get rid of it.

The kitchen is my next target - that's going to be a doozy. Then the basement.

One of the other things Ms. Kondo says is you can't expect others in your household to fall in line with your new maniacal cleaning regime, so don't try. This of  course is my chief source of stress. I can clean up my own stuff, but nobody else will clean up theirs so I'm still living in an ovecluttered house. Her belief is seeing the clean will inspire others to clean. I'm not sure she's married and I don't think she has children. That's why her world is rainbows and  unicorns. But at least I'm in charge of my own stuff and I'm making that work.

What's next in my Zen life-changing project? I don't know but now that I've gotten rid of junk and lowered my stress level, anything is possible.