Great Barrington — An international decluttering craze rooted in ancient thinking, one that gained momentum with the work of a young Japanese organizing consultant, is alive and stirring up all kinds of good trouble in the Berkshires.
Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is a mega hit in the West, a New York Times bestseller that evokes Japanese anthropomorphism — and our own emotions — to deal with all our “stuff.” Yes, Kondo is saying, if you take loving care of your socks, even bless them a bit, they will respond by taking good care of your feet.
She is radical, and that’s why we love her. She doesn’t believe in “storage solutions.” She thinks that’s just a recipe for more stuff. “Discard first, store later,” she writes. It’s a new twist in the decluttering world. Kondo’s book vaulted into our psyches because she tilted the pursuit of lightness and simplicity in a way that we could download into our cluttered minds. To have less and appreciate what one loves because it makes one feel good, or because it so useful, is her point.
Keep only what “sparks joy,” is Kondo’s mantra. Toss the rest.
But it’s that tossing that, for a moment, makes us feel like we are about to commit seppuku with our samurai sword until we’ve realized that we didn’t need 500 square feet of saran wrap just because it was on sale, or those telemark ski boots that used to spark joy but we’ve turned to down hilling. We feel so much better when we clear a space. If you don’t believe me, try this: tell friends you’ve rented a dumpster. They will offer to buy drinks at Prairie Whale.
Next! Select Consignment on South Main Street is ground zero for the grand letting go sans dumpster. And lately, my former neighbor and friend, owner Faith DiVecchio, has found her store inundated with Louis Vuitton this and Chanel that as the affluent Northeast devours Kondo’s book.
“Every day someone comes into the store and says, ‘I read the Kondo book,’ ” DiVecchio tells me. They drop their bags laden with Prada, with Burberry. I happen to be sipping room temperature sake from a small lacquer box at Bizen, our beloved Japanese restaurant and sushi bar. Now I am furiously scribbling.
“And everywhere I go,” she continues, “someone is talking about the book.”
“Me too!” I say. Last summer, having just read it, I was doing some sleuthing in the Town Clerk’s office when a friend came in, holding the Kondo book under his arm. His wife, he said, had just barely finished reading the last sentence when he snatched it away from her.
It started with me, weeks earlier. I hadn’t uttered the last half of the book’s title when his wife cut me off: “–– I’m getting that.” Before I knew it, she did what I had with the clothes: giving away or dumping the excess or joyless, and folding what remained according to Kondo’s “KonMari” method, which involves a triple fold and clothes stacked on their edges. Even my husband is doing it now. And I stress “even.”
It is a strange and wondrous little book full of anecdotes of Kondo’s adventures dealing with a materialist culture in tiny Tokyo apartments (which she enters in her finest dress, and prays before she begins.) Translated from the Japanese, one can hear Kondo speaking English with a heavy accent as she cites excessive numbers of ordinary things like toothbrushes. “As for toilet paper, the record stock so far is eighty rolls.”
She is funny. “The ultimate record, however, was a stockpile of 20,000 cotton swabs.”
There is a three-month waiting list for Kondo’s services.
Kondo recommends a sneaky approach to dealing with people who might hang on to such a surplus. Those of us who have cleaned clutter out of an older parent’s home, for instance, have all been guilty of shoving things into garbage bags when the parents aren’t looking. They may think they need 10 different kinds of hair spray but we quietly make eight of those disappear. And parents, Kondo says, can’t handle what their grown children toss of their own, either. “It’s extremely stressful for parents to see what their children discard,” Kondo writes, under the heading, in bold, “Don’t let your family see.”
Clearing out frees up time, too. “I never tidy my room,” Kondo writes. “Why? Because it’s already tidy.”
DiVecchio, a homeschooling parent of three with a Waldorf education background, says her New York City clients, aware of, or having read the Kondo book, are releasing their treasures to her rather than the more “exclusive” city consignment shops. “The book is a movement,” she says, “the enlivening of the material world that is happening all around the planet.” DiVecchio says Kondo’s very Japanese concept that our things respond to our treatment of them, our affection for them, is gaining traction because humanity is receptive right now, in the way “all the spiritual traditions” predicted. “The dense matter that we perceive as dead is coming alive.”
She mentions the Age of Aquarius and other changes, like those in the universe, tracked by satellites.
But what about stuff like handbags and those quilted, like-new, Tori Burch platform snow boots I saw in DiVecchio’s store? Some may find it inconceivable that one would part with something so expensive, having worn them maybe once.
“The thing that no longer gives you joy will give someone else joy,” says DiVecchio, who opened the store in 2014. The beauty of consignment, she adds, is that “it no longer has to be manufactured.” It is partly this that brings DiVecchio a spark of joy in her work, she says. “Kondo talks about how it can make you happier — it’s not about the stuff, it’s about you. What you do in your material world affects your energetic and emotional world.”
People tell DiVecchio Kondo’s book is life-changing, by giving them “more courage” to part with the past.
Maybe here in the modern West we need to be lighter, I say. Decluttering is a modern fixation.
“Just think of the number of job changes the average person has compared to in the past,” DiVecchio says. We talk about Kung Fu master Bruce Lee, and his instruction in energy and movement: “Become water,” he says. Water moves around obstacles, it “molds to the container,” as another friend observed. Perhaps in modern life, flexibility is stability. It’s a cycle: The lighter the load, and the happier with the load, the more flexible. The more flexible, the happier, and so on.
“When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go,” Kondo writes, “there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”
