Once the word “condo” conjured up a particular type of US property ownership, as in “Did you hear Paddy just bought himself a big condo in Florida?” There’s now a new word, same-sounding, but different spelling and meaning. Remarks like “I just Kondo-ed my drawers” are common parlance among devotees of a bestselling self-help manual that has taken Japan and the US by storm.
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Maria Kondo is that dream of publishers and writers alike – a global publishing phenomenon. The book has sold over 2 million copies, its success down to its 30-year old Japanese author's ability to tell readers how to get rid of stuff they don't need. Mindfulness is so last year. To be really in the moment, you start by ditching all of those single socks with no match.
At a basic level, Kondo recommends examining every item in your home, and then asking yourself does it “tokimeku” (spark joy)? This, she says, lets you see clearly what you need in life, and what you don’t. We should take it as given that this scrutiny applies solely to family items, not family members.
We’ve seen previous equivalents of the “home-organising guru” pop up before, starting with the trend for minimalism back in 2000. Throughout the “boom” years, you could hire a de-cluttering expert to advise on paring back the domestic paraphernalia before putting your home on the market. For the incurable hoarder, this often meant driving around the block with a car boot stuffed with everything from boxes of Lego to the vacuum cleaner while the selling agent showed the unwitting would-be buyer round your (temporarily) pristine gaff.
Back on planet Kondo – and interestingly for a book concentrating on tidying – you needn’t stress about having to head to IKEA for a load of empty boxes and Billy bookshelves; Kondo rejects the concept of storage. “I can honestly declare that storage methods do not solve the problem of getting rid of clutter – they are only a superficial answer.” We’ll ignore, for the moment, the fact that buying a book about tidying up also means you are adding back to that stuff again.
Publicity surrounding Kondo’s success says that self-help manuals were the fastest-selling category of printed books in 2014. And it may come as a surprise to the elder lemons among us that a significant chunk of the readership is the young, from those starry-eyed first-time buyers barred from dumping all of their unwanted junk in Mum and Dad’s garage, to loft-dwelling hipsters needing extra elbow-room for their vintage shirts and beard-trimmers.
So have we become a nation once again of de-clutterers, young and old alike? Charity store donations are a reliable indicator of trends. At Enable Ireland, communications manager Aghna Hennigan says that donations were actually down in recent years.
“People weren’t buying the same quantity of clothes as in the boom, and they weren’t clearing out as much either. Corporate donations were down too – we used to get some donations of end-of-line stock from clothes retailers, but this dried up too.”
Confidence has now reared its head again as the economy shows signs of recovery, and donations are on the increase once more as people clear out their wardrobes. Incidentally, the most unusual donation one branch received was a litter of live bunnies – obviously given straight over to the ISPCA, Hennigan reassures.
Books devour space, and so, as you might expect, are currently the biggest category of donations to charity due to the rise and rise of the Kindle e-reader. But that little book donation flurry has eased, says Christine Kostik, manager of Oxfam Books on Dublin’s Parliament Street, along with a change in the type of donor.
“Donors are either selling their books or are not buying as they used to and therefore not donating, or passing them onto friends and family. I also think these donors donate the books they feel they could replace if necessary in e-book form. They keep the more specialised books or ones of sentimental value.”
Certainly, people shifting address or emigrating still figure highly in type of donor, she says.
“We still get donations from people who are moving apartment, house or country, and do not have the space to take their books or music with them. I also think that some donors have moved into smaller living spaces and now have to enforce the ‘get a book, donate a book’ rule. A customer the other day said it was either that or she wouldn’t be able to get into her bed.”
For those of us for whom the association with the word “magic” is not tidying up, Kondo insists it can be a therapeutic experience. She even has a CD of classical music (pieces by Chopin, Back and Ravel) to listen to in the background as you alternate between guilt and anxiety over binning unwanted pressies from your beloved and chucking out your little darling’s artistic masterpieces from playgroup, circa 1995. But as we struggle for space in our bloated homes groaning with excess junk, knowing we will never measure up to the standards of this Zen housekeeper, a degree of consolation lies ahead. News just in (tap nostril twice and point finger): Maria Kondo is expecting her first child.
