The exercise goes something like this: at the start of class, I ask students to take out a piece of paper, which more often than not these days means they cast about looking helpless till a more-responsible classmate offers aid. I give them some prompt, whose subject changes each time I try this but which always includes the injunction to “make it beautiful.” Not merely a jotting down of their thoughts, I want them to think about their sentences and to make something in which they can take a measure of pride. It’s difficult for them. They wring their hands in exhaustion, having handwritten a full-page of prose after so much time only typing. When I collect them—just to turn up the heat a bit—I say to make sure their names are atop the work. I tap the papers on my desk to neaten the pile and then tear the whole stack in half, once, twice, and then place them in the recycling bin.
Usually, someone curses. Someone else shouts “what?” Several gasp audibly as though I’d just stomped a beloved pet. I ask how they feel and the responses range between “angry” and “amused,” settling somewhere around “frustrated.” What I want them to feel is free.
Marie Kondo has built an entertainment empire out of helping people clean up their stuff, beginning with her New York Times bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying-Up,” extending through a slate of international speaking tours and YouTube videos about folding your socks, into its current incarnation as a Netflix series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.” The method is really about simplifying one’s life through developing a healthier relationship with our possessions. We shouldn’t keep anything around, Kondo advises, that doesn’t “spark joy.” When we get rid of something, Kondo recommends taking a moment to thank it—a worn-out shirt, an old photograph—for serving us.
It’s all a little silly of course, but is also surprisingly touching. Most of the clients on the show weep with thankfulness at the release they feel having organized their garages. Their lives seem actually and measurably changed.
Part of the method’s success is Kondo’s own quirky charm, but part also must be the reformation of capitalism it implies. Most of us have lived our entire lives under advertising’s insistence that we are, more or less, what we own: my sense of the responsibilities of manhood defined by the brand of razor I use, of patriotism by the brand of beer I drink, my strength and attractiveness measured by the number of seats and/or horsepower my primary vehicle does, or does not, have. And even if those narratives are not true all of the time for all of us, it does seem true that I am, for example, the fellow with those blue towels, who has won these awards in my garage, and who was married in that suit that no longer fits. I save them out of inertia, sure, but also as remembrances, as bricks in the foundation of this self as I understand it.
Read the full essay at Mockingbird →
Originally published in Mockingbird, 2019-03-19.
