Boy, oh boy, is Marie Kondo and her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up a hot topic these days. Some people love her, some people hate her. But overall? Most people really misunderstand the heart of her method. There are memes, memes, everywhere making fun of the “spark joy” concept or the idea of only owning thirty books (Marie never actually enforces this, friends). And people are upset at the concept that she thanks the items before she donates them. And to all those people, I just want to say, “READ THE BOOK.” Marie Kondo’s method has completely changed our home–and our home school. But it required reading the book, not just reading a few memes or watching an episode on Netflix.
It’s easy to make fun of or disregard something that you don’t actually understand. For example, her Netflix special is very good but I feel like the editors never read the book because they completely missed her method in most of what they did. I have been sad for all the people who are decluttering their homes based on the Netflix show because they are going to attempt it completely wrong and it’s not going to work.
Because the heart of Marie Kondo’s method is not actually about throwing out things that don’t spark joy (like the electric bill and your treadmill, as the memes say) and it’s not about talking to inanimate objects. And it is FOR SURE not about getting your book collection down to thirty books.
The KonMari method is about two things: dealing with your emotions and how they affect your house, and decluttering by category instead of by location.
Every other decluttering method on the planet tells you to clean out a bathroom or clean out a closet, and work from location to location. But that doesn’t work and that’s why your house ends up a cluttered mess again.
Instead, Marie has you work by category so that you have to face how much you really have. You see ALL your shoes and can assess whether or not you really need that many. You gather all your office supplies in one place and realize you have 500 pens and maybe you should stop buying them. You put all your books together and work through them. And when you put your stuff away, you keep those categories together from then on. So instead of having six piles of pens around the house, they are all together, always. Then you can SEE when you really need more
. And if you keep all your swim towels together, all your travel toiletries, all your extra blankets, etc, each in it’s own space, you can tell when you have too many or too much because the space becomes too crowded and you can thin it out a little bit. This means your entire house never again gets out of control because when you keep everything put away by category, you can quickly declutter a spot when you need to. You just have to put in the energy ONCE to get it done right and then the rest of your life, your house can stay organized.
It sounds crazy but it’s true. We KonMari’d our home three years ago and it’s still in working order, with three children running around. Of course, we have to resort through different categories as the kids grow and interests change. By now that we did the one BIG declutter, we can touch up small categories on an as-needed basis. And now every item in our home has a place. Guess what? The kids know those places as well and they all know how to clean up and put everything away. No matter how messy our house gets, it never, EVER, takes more than 45 minutes to have it completely put back together. Thank you, Marie Kondo. I have so much more time to myself, which is how I manage to write this blog, run an Etsy shop, home school my kids, AND direct Challenge B. I could not have done that before KonMari, plain and simple.
The other aspect of the KonMari method that seems to get tossed aside is the part where you deal with your emotions about items in your house. It’s not easy, friends. It’s not easy to pick up something that was a gift that was given to you by someone you aren’t friends with anymore and realize that every time you look at it, you feel sad and it’s time to let it go. It’s not easy to hold a book that you always meant to read and admit that you WISH you were the kind of person who was going to read that book but you just aren’t. And let that book go. It’s painful. It’s hard to give up clothes that you know are never going to fit again and admit that. It’s hard to hold things in your hand that bring back bad memories and say it’s time to kick those memories out of your home.
I’ll give you my biggest example from my KonMari journey. Someone gave us a free piano. Of course I said yes! We are home schoolers! Home schoolers are supposed to have a piano in the house. It’s like a RULE. But having that piano in our house made me feel guilty. Because we didn’t use it. There is nothing in life I hate more than listening to children play instruments poorly. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. Maybe that means I have to hand in my home school card. But it’s the truth. My kids do not take music lessons because I am not emotionally strong enough to listen to them practice. I’m just not.
And having that piano in the house made me feel like a failure. It whispered to me daily, a reminder that I wasn’t a perfect home school mom. That I wasn’t good enough. That I was failing. That I was an absolute, and total failure. But then I read Marie Kondo’s book and she taught me that what I needed to do was accept this part of myself and admit it freely! So, here I am telling you all, “I AM NOT THE KIND OF MOM WHO CARES IF MY KIDS TAKE MUSIC LESSONS!” What a weight off my shoulders! And that piano? It left my house, along with my insecurities and doubts and feelings of being a failure in that respect. Goodbye, piano, goodbye.
Marie asks you to work through those emotions with every item in your house. And obviously not every item in your home is going to draw out THAT kind of reaction. But you may be surprised by how many DO. I sure was. I let go of books on home schooling theory that left me feeling like I was not doing it right. I let go of stacks of books that “good classical educators MUST read”. I let go of supplies for science projects that I knew in my heart we were never going to get around to doing. But in that process, I also found some science supplies that I forgot we had that I really WANTED to dig into–so we did. And clearing out the piles upon piles of books that I “should have been reading” to my kids, I came out with a smaller pile of books that I loved and WANTED to read to my kids. We now only own books we LOVE. We get so many books from our amazing public library every week, we get to find out what we love and what is worth owning. And about once a year we go through our book collection and see if we’ve outgrown any of them and want to pass them along to someone else.
Working through the KonMari process helped me find focus, purpose, and peace in our homeschool. And you know what? The summer that we worked through the process (this is not a weekend project, expect it to take 3-6 months!), we discovered Classical Conversations. And I realized as I was finally truly discovering my goals and my purpose in home schooling, my shortcomings, and my strengths, that Classical Conversations was the perfect complement. It matched my goals and my purpose and made up for my shortcomings (the kids do art, science, and music at CC so I don’t have to feel any guilt when we don’t do those things at home!). And for me personally, Classical Conversations has really changed my life and given me so many opportunities for personal growth. So when Marie Kondo calls it “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” she’s not kidding. When you narrow down the items in your house to match what really matters to you, you end up finding out who you really are and where you belong.
