Krazy for Kondo

This photo has almost nothing to do with decluttering (I say almost because it's a Rent the Runway dress, which has really helped me cut down on buying clothes) but I can't help but post it because I actually put some effort into my appearance for once!  Matt and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary with steaks at Arthur J and dessert at Sosta Cucina.  So yummy.

Rosie kept messing with my perfectly Kondo-ed drawers!

The photobombers strike again! For some reason the little ones were underfoot the entire time that I was taking the photos required to qualify for the Kondo training seminar.

I ended up including this one in the submission packet because Rosie looks so stinkin' cute!  Also I wanted them to know that I have 3 kids which is why my house looks like an actual home instead of a magazine shoot.

I gave a shout-out to Marie before (here) and also blogged about minimalism in passing (here and here) but I thought I’d give it another go since her Netflix show has swept the nation and I just completed my registration for her official consultant training seminar here in LA in September.  I promise to blog on that later but first…

Guys, I am so excited to see Marie Kondo go truly mainstream! I have been a Kondite, er, Kondophile (whatever) for about three years now. I bought her book after I was already pretty deep into de-cluttering but it helped me bring some structure to the whole process. I particularly like her approach to clothing, where you pile everything in one place and fall down into a full-on shame spiral… I kid… sort of.

It was so cool to see her work with people and put her books into action. Her compassion and kindness is so genuine, which is probably why the show has really taken off. As I contemplate making a career change in her direction, I realize that this is an area that I need to work on. I’m so passionate about organization and de-cluttering that I tend to forget that most people probably need to start with baby steps and be gently pushed and not shoved along.

Still, I wish that she had gone a bit farther in the show. Not necessarily farther in the sense of getting rid of stuff (though I think some of the families certainly could have) but farther in the sense of why we accumulate things in the first place and tackling what happens (or should happen) after the initial decluttering.

I believe that we cannot successfully declutter unless we explore the unsettling reasons that we try to fill emotional voids by accumulating clutter. We can buy stuff and declutter again and again but the cycle will never be broken until we confront that difficult truth… and continue to confront it again each time we inevitably slip up and engage in retail therapy instead of meditation (yep, that’s still me when my stress levels are high and my frivolous spending gets higher). It’s so hard. Almost every message we are bombarded with is geared toward making us feel like less so we’ll buy more. The rest are geared toward making us feel that we deserve to buy more, as if that’s not only our right but our destiny.

There were only a few moments during the show’s 8 episodes that came close to confronting this. For instance, the empty-nester wife of episode two talks about retail therapy and shopping sprees to hit her husband where it hurts (in the wallet). But by and large, they (and we) weren’t asked to identify and change problematic consumption habits.

I fear that by watching the show alone, viewers will think that our problem is just keeping too many sentimental trinkets and old magazines, when it’s really buying so many things and attaching such sentimental meaning to them in the first place.

Sure, it’s a tempting practice and one that we’re all guilty of to varying degrees (hello Disneyland souvenirs!). But when you break it down it’s such a strangely modern practice to associate memories with trinkets. For most of humankind we had almost no physical possessions other than weapons and survival necessities. Yet somehow, we were able to remember things without those physical triggers and pass down family histories through stories and songs. One day human civilization will collapse and we’ll have to do the same all over again. It will be awful but kind of beautiful when people remember that they don’t need things to remember.