“The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo is more than a book about cleaning your home. Cleaning and organizing one’s stuff is life-changing and soul-cleansing—if you do it correctly, of course.
She has a few recommendations to complete a successful cleaning. First, you must discard. Second, you begin the process of tidying. To discard, collect all like items (i.e., clothes) and put them all into one place.
Touch each article of clothes (or whatever the items are) and see if it brings a spark of joy to your life. If it doesn’t, then it needs to be discarded. Once you have discarded everything, then you can tidy your home.
My favorite part of the book is that you have to thank each item for “its service.” Before discarding each item, you will say an audible thank you and pray. I also found it interesting when she talked about folding clothes.
She especially doesn’t like when people (like me) ball their socks together. We beat our socks up every day, and then we ball them up after washing. This is their time to rest, but they can’t because they are an uncomfortable ball. With that, let’s get into my five takeaways.
1) The author defines a rigid order of how to start discarding items: clothes, books, papers, Komono (miscellaneous), and finally sentimental items. You save sentimental items for last because you will have already trained yourself in the art of discarding.
2) Folding your clothes saves much more space than hanging them in the closet—with the point of seeing every item within the drawer. This means that we need to fold into rectangles instead of squares.
3) When reviewing photos, you must touch each photo and see if it brings joy. Usually, you only need five images from each day of a trip. The rest are additional photos that don’t tell the event’s story.
4) Tidying is the main event and should be completed quickly. She considers six months to be tidy as a practical timeline. First, you discard; then you tidy.
5) Don’t focus on storage in the beginning. You will keep as much as your storage allows you to maintain. That’s why we discord first, then allocate enough necessary storage to keep our required items.
I learned so much while reading this book. The most important thing is that your items have already served their purpose. They have made us into the person that we are today. There is genuinely no need to hold onto our entire history.
I need to reconcile my Marine Corps memories and my video game collection. These things have served their purpose, and I need to narrow these items down to only those that bring me joy.
Having a tidy place to call home is a physical, spiritual, and emotional awakening. I believe in minimalism (in its purest form), and this book is a step-by-step guide for you to tidy your home with excellent results. A must-read if you want to improve your living space.
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