Before Kondo Was Cool

“KonMari-ing” has been a verb in my house for the last three years.  

Ever since I spent a spring day on my deck reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, my home has never been the same. Later I gifted that book to a friend who needed it as much as I did, but Marie Kondo’s other book, Spark Joy has a permanent roost on my (clean) closet shelf where it reminds me daily that if something doesn’t spark joy, it needs to go.

Now Marie Kondo has her own series on Netflix and I couldn’t be more excited—and my hubby couldn’t be less—to watch her work. I feel like I’ve been privy to a secret of which the rest of the world is finally becoming aware. Marie Kondo’s now famous KonMari Method of tidying is simple: tidy by categories and keep only what sparks joy.

Easy enough, right?

Disclaimer: I don’t follow all her guidelines. You’ll not find my underwear folded into perfect pouches because I just don’t care enough about my skivvies to take the time, or each drawer neatly segmented by small boxes—though some are. What Marie Kondo did for me went far beyond ideas for how to organize my cupboards. She provided the means to execute minimalism the way it works for me.

I have stuff. More than I would like but less than I used to have. My hubs, who rolls his eyes but humors me when I ask him to go through his closet—again—has much more stuff than I do. When I first scratched the surface of minimalism, I didn’t know how to get him on board since my pleas to build a tiny house, or sell everything and move to a small flat in Europe were met with more eye rolls, the shaking of his head, and usually some unpleasant mutterings under his breath. My husband is not a minimalist. Every time he brings more crap through the front door, I’m sneaking a box bound for St. Vinny’s out the back.

But I digress.

Marie Kondo is how we meet in the middle. When you ask, “Does this spark joy?” and the answer is NO, what is the argument for keeping it? What argument could my husband possibly have for keeping all eight tape measures we found when going through the garage? One, maybe two, spark joy for the simple fact that they are useful. But eight? We don’t even have that many rooms in our house, let alone a measuring crisis that requires multiple tape measures to fix. The genius of going through items by category, rather than room, is that you see exactly how much of a particular thing you have (ahem—eight tape measures in as many different nooks and crannies) which makes it easier to purge the excess.

The Minimalists Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus, the first people to introduce me minimalism, use the rule: if it can be replaced for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes, it should go. For certain things I agree—the mini toolkits that show up at Christmas, old binders from college waiting for a new purpose, the fourth pair of scissors in the junk drawer—but since my hubs would blow a gasket if I applied that rule to everything (the unused chemicals under the sink, the cookbooks we never open, the C.D.’s he hasn’t listened to since the dawn of XM Radio, the hundred-or-so DVD’s on a spindle in our spare bedroom) Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” concept works a little better for us. Hint: if you’re wondering how to do this in places like the kitchen, your spoons and spatulas might not whip your heart into a frenzy, but if they are used often, their convenience is a joy in itself, is it not?

When you KonMari your home, it’s supposed to be a one-and-done kind of thing. I like to do the whole house once a year, and certain parts—like my closet—more often than that. What sparked joy six months ago might not be what sparks joy today. Even though I’m not a sentimental person (please don’t give me anything you hope I will keep forever) I’ve kept things long past their joy date out of guilt or because someone else assigned importance to them. There’s the necklace with the clasp that rips my hair out, but it was a gift and the giver would be hurt if they knew I gave it away, and the trinket someone brought back from another country that is irreplaceable but I don’t love, and the dress from two years ago that I’ve never worn because it doesn’t fit, but since I spent way too much money on it, I can’t just give it away…

…Actually, now I can.

With every KonMari pass through my house, my courage grows until I’ve finally thanked even these troublesome items for their service and sent them on their way. What use are clothes that never leave the hanger, or a necklace at the bottom of your jewelry box, or all those other things that fill every corner of our homes that we don’t look at but that we’ve collected from family or one-too-many trips to Target?

A serious minimalist would probably walk in my house and declare I’m still drowning in items. While my home contains stuff, every year it houses a little less. And when I look around at my organized closets and uncluttered shelves, I feel the true ease and happiness that comes from being surrounded by not as many things as can possibly fit, but that which I love and appreciate, and continues to Spark Joy.