KonMari Your Way to Joy

— William Morris, writer and textile designer (1834–1896)

A few years ago I broke my foot. We had just moved into a new house in a new city. I was carrying a pile of boxes and cardboard out the back door, missed a small step (no muscle memory yet), and fell. I was confined to my couch with my foot elevated for weeks and weeks.

Ice. Heat. Ice. Heat. Elevate. Elevate. Elevate.

Since we had at that point moved SIX times in less than ten years, I knew we had work to do. We had not fully unpacked in any of those moves, so we had boxes that had just been moved and moved and moved again — always in the hope that THIS would be a long-term move. And we knew that at least one more move was coming, because we were in Los Angeles for a temporary work assignment — just a few years and then we would be moving again.

So I pulled out my rolling chair, and I got to work.

Now, to be clear, because I was injured, I couldn’t work Marie Kondo’s magic exactly as she describes. But I started with clothes piled on our bed. And I made those brutal decisions. “Does this spark joy?” I asked over and over and over again. That is the first and critical step in Kondo’s tidying method — the KonMari Method. Devotees of KonMari use it both as a noun and as a verb.

Despite the fact that we were in a temporary home, with Marie Kondo’s help and a rolling task chair, I made my way through that house, category by category, room by room. And we fully and completely unpacked for the first time in almost a decade. My dresser drawers were immaculate. Bambino’s toys were thinned. And we made thousands of dollars of donations to various local organizations.

It was awesome!

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