This week's book review is about a book I read this week. My goal is to read 200 books this year. I know this is a huge amount of books, but everyone should have goals of some kind. Knowing the volume of books available to read 200 is just a small amount of books. Anyway... on the what this book is about.
I like to review books and here is a book that I just finished. It is called “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, by Marie Kondo. She now has her own show on Netflix. I have spent my life tidying up my bedroom as a child and my home as an adult. I thought I was doing a really great job. As I read this book, I found that there was a completely different approach to my tidying. Although I called it cleaning but, maybe tidying is a far better term for what the action is. I found through her book that what I was really doing was rearranging things and not really tidying.
I used to read all kinds of books on how to clean and how to organize. I created all kinds of systems and list after list. I made lists for everything. I was organized and methodical. The one thing that I was really failing in, was not getting rid of things. Having grown up in the military we were never allowed to keep a lot of things. We were only given so much weight for household goods we could ship, so we could never accumulate things. It is only when you settle down and live in one place for many years that you start to accumulate stuff. What we did was every three years we would purge so much of our possessions. While I was grew up not knowing how to throw things away or recycle or sell or take it to Goodwill. My siblings and I would go to school and come home, and everything was done. We never knew where things were or what happened to my favorite things.
This book was great because she gets into the psychology of tidying. Why people do or don’t tidy. Marie takes it down to how to get started and a system to accomplish the tasks at hand. I think that everyone who reads the book will find something relevant to themselves. It is never to late to learn something new and apply it.
I would like to dig a little deeper here and focus on hording. I believe this is where the real issue is. People collect things for a variety of reasons. One can suddenly find themselves drowning in things and having to rent storage space to keep all one’s stuff. Then one goes and buys more stuff and then one must go buy a bigger house. See where I am going with this? Marie does talk about this topic some in her book also. As an individual I would like for you to stop and think about hording. Are you one? Are you becoming one? There is help available no matter how little or how much stuff you have.
By letting go of your abundance of stuff it is cathartic. It really is. How did you get so emotionally attached to the things you buy? Why is it so hard to get rid of the things you have? For me, I loved the fact that I had less to tidy. I had less to clean and it freed up more of my time. I have more time to enjoy doing things outside and with family and friends. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders by having less to do.
So, read the book, learn some new techniques and then get out there and be part of life!
My next review will be on the book "Girl' Wash Your Face", by Rachel Hollis.