Finding joy at home
Published 10:52 pm Thursday, January 17, 2019
For the last week or so, I’ve been staring at my living room and cringing.
Currently, my apartment is being crammed into boxes, and instead of looking organized, it looks like a bomb exploded.
There’s one nice corner with boxes that are labeled and stacked neatly, but once you get out of that corner, it’s the source of much of my stress. The moral of this story is that I hate moving.
Moving is the worst.
I would much rather cut my parents’ grass with a pair of cuticle scissors than pack and move.
Well, obviously, I’m being dramatic, but packing is kind of terrible, because it requires you to go through everything you own.
Thankfully, I’ve jumped on the bandwagon with other Netflix users and decided to watch (only one episode of) “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” to help get through the nasty packing process.
Kondo is the world-renowned tidying expert who also has two books on the subject, and her Netflix show features inspiring home makeovers. I can agree that they are inspiring, because once I watched the first episode, I was ready to throw away almost everything I owned.
Marie Kondo, who seems like the world’s most gentle and kind human, walks into these people’s homes and asks a simple question.
“Does it spark joy?”
When you pick up an item in your home it should give you joy, and if it doesn’t, its rightful place is in the garbage (or Goodwill).
I found myself really digging deep into my personal items and asking myself if it gave me joy, and I found myself saying “no” a lot more often that I thought.
The more I went through things, I really honed in on what the feeling of joy meant for me, and I believe the things I put in my boxes are going to give me joy.
I hate cleaning, despite the anxiety caused by a dirty home, but Kondo’s methods make the idea of tidying up a little more manageable.
The KonMari Method is something that Kondo has devised from her life’s work of tidying, and it gives clear steps of how to tidy and find joy in your home.
I’m debating on continuing to watch the show, but that is only because I’m not the world’s biggest fan of unscripted television.
The one episode was enough to give me the push to take a second look at the things I own, and I think it is a sustainable way to keep my house happy.