I was beginning to panic. I had been neatening papers since noon of the day before, and both I and my home were looking, if anything, even more disorganized and disheveled than when I’d begun. My in-laws were stopping by for dinner tonight, and I needed the place to look decent.
“What would Marie Kondo say?” my husband asked, from his end of the haystack which had once been the dining room table. His piles were neater, but no less problematic than mine.
He was baiting me. “She’d say put all the papers into one gigantic pile on the floor,” I began.
“And set them on fire?”
“No. She’d probably say take each one in my hand and ask myself if it ‘sparks joy’. Which would give me a welter of paper cuts. AND take all of my next lifetime to get through. We definitely do not have that kind of time!”
“So how about we just throw it all out?”
“No!” I howled in distress. “We can’t do that because somewhere in here is the best version of my entry into that poetry contest but the computer died rather than save; and a letter from my Mom about her childhood; and…”
“Don’t worry, I understand. So what about this for Plan B: we shovel everything into these boxes I bought for just this occasion? Then we stack it all in the back room.”
“Where — not on the treadmill? How will you get your exercise?”
“I think we’ll get more than enough just stacking the boxes,” he said.
I took an empty box back to my desk. I was sitting down, trying to get my arms around a particularly unruly stack of papers, when suddenly, something slid out of the pile and landed in my lap. It was a book.
If Marie Kondo is harsh on papers, that’s nothing compared to her attitude about books.
“She never says to get rid of all your books!” my husband says in disbelief. “After all, she’s made millions from writing two.”
“You’re right. She says something even worse: if something in a book speaks to you, she says to just tear out that page and keep it.”
My husband didn’t believe me till I showed him this quote: “Realizing that what I really wanted to keep was not the book but certain information or specific words… I finally decided to rip the relevant page out of the book. This only took five minutes per book and I managed to get rid of 40 books and keep the words that I liked.”
Tear out a page and throw the rest of the book away? You can’t even give it away after that! I honestly think I’d prefer someone who respects a book at least enough to burn it.
I have an idea for Marie Kondo: Every word she likes is already in the dictionary. So just keep one of those, and give all her other books, safely intact, to someone who knows how to value them.
Someone like me.
I looked down at the book in my lap. It was “Messy,” by Tim Harford. The book’s subtitle said it all: “The power of disorder to transform our lives.”
Here, thanks to my decluttering, was the perfect antidote to Marie Kondo’s madness!
Harford believes that messiness is a powerful source of creativity. In this book, he documents how it works its magic in one field after another — in music, in advertising, in business — even at MIT’s Building 20, whose “squat, ugly, sprawling structure” and confusing, labyrinthine hallways forced physicists, artists, model railroad enthusiasts and linguists all to get lost, bump into each other and talk.
Building 20 was home to such innovations as the first commercial atomic clock, radar systems that won World War II, an early particle accelerator, Edgerton’s stop-motion photos, the first arcade-style video game… and at least nine Nobel laureates.
Harford says that people or books or ideas that “bump into” each other can spark questions, creating entire fields of inquiry that might not have started any other way.
Hmm. Sparks, indeed.
My husband finished boxing up the papers, and together we made a lovely neat stack next to the treadmill. Then — it killed me to do it, but — I tore a page out of Kondo’s book to use as a bookmark in my copy of “Messy.”
Together, they will remind me to value the sparks of creativity over the “sparks” and “joys” of neatness — as soon as dinner with the in-laws is over.
