talking to my possessions as if they were alive

tidy or not, Marie Kondo hopefully still does this. I know I will.

I was going to write this post about how Marie Kondo taught me Shintoistic piety anyway, but in the wake of news outlets reporting how she “has given up on cleaning because [god forbid] she has three children now!”, I decided to publish this faster before the mobs discredit her.

I think it’s helpful to focus on how Marie spent five years as as a Shinto shrine maiden, and the way to tidy ends up being a result of a general reverent gentle approach to looking at your things intentionally and mindfully.

Thanks to Marie Kondo, I’m not necessarily tidier in a conventional sense, but I feel at peace and alive in ways I didn’t before. I can look at what I have and understand what it means to me, and understand also what I don’t need. This was instrumental when I did a cross country move. This has led to me being more organized in ways I didn’t expect, and where I’m not organized, I understand what the emotional blockers are.

Life circumstances entail you have to change your approach. Does Marie’s perhaps temporary change of methods mean her tidying advice isn’t valid and won’t work anymore? Does this mean she’s a traitor to her craft? I don’t know, but for me, the part that stuck out most in her book was always this section:

“One of the homework assignments I give my clients is to appreciate their belongings. For example, I urge them to try saying, “Thank you for keeping me warm all day,” when they hang up their clothes after returning home. Or, when removing their accessories, I suggest they say, “Thank you for making me beautiful,” and when putting their bag in the closet, to say, “It’s thanks to you that I got so much work done today.””

She speaks of how she thanked her first cell phone for everything when it was time to replace it, and it went dead after she sent the text message with her gratitude, “as if realizing that its job was done,” “resign[ing] from its post of its own accord.”

Now, I, too, decided that what mattered more than keeping things organized was respecting my things as if they are alive. To devote attention and care and musing to how to provide them with homes in ways that worked for me and those possessions. As if in agreement. I would ask my makeup how it wanted to be stored, and tried to practice listening. This was, in fact, synchronistic sometimes with getting Amazon product suggestions or even seeing targeted ads for storage methods for that specific item.

I would also “ask” the winter coats I bought if they’d like me to wear them before proceeding. I’d think very carefully and intentionally about if my new backpack was necessary and would get along with sharing the load with my other backpack. I’d stare at my monitor I forgot to buy an adapter for for weeks and write a letter to it before I finally got around to hooking it up.

This intentional way of living led to me also putting a spring in my step with organizing my clothes, creating a Notion for my ideas, getting rid of some things I didn’t need even if I just bought them, and making intentional and gentle timelines for when I’d let go of the things I couldn’t discard yet.

I’d make sure to touch everything, and this led to me reading more books as well.

Meanwhile, I also make sure to form entire relationships with things that are outside of their use to me. When I have boy troubles, I ask my mug what I should do. When I have career woes, I hug my jackets and thank them for keeping me warm while I figure it out. When I have to waste food, I apologize to it gently before I dump it away. When I come home to Portland, I say hello and thank you for raising me to my house. When I moved away from Los Angeles, I knelt to the ground and kissed my bedroom floor before I closed the door for the last time.

It felt freeing to shamelessly assign meaning to the “lucky bra” or the “book that was mad I never touched it anymore but at last there’s another water bottle that would never get mad at me because it was just kinder”. And honestly, after I started touching my things and talking to them, like Marie does, I started feeling less guilty about buying things that might go to waste.

“If we treated all things we use in our daily life with the same care that athletes give to their equipment, we could greatly increase the number of dependable “supporters” in our lives… our belongings work really hard for us, carrying out their respective roles each day to support our lives,” Marie writes. “Just as we like to come home and relax after a day’s work, our things breathe a sigh of relief when they return to where they belong. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to have no fixed address? Our lives would be very uncertain.

I’m sure when her children are more grown up, she’ll go back to her tidying ways because that’s naturally her. Circumstances goes for different approaches. But beyond the fact that this is judgmental of a perfectly reasonable way to quit tidying — MOTHERHOOD, HELLO, but more on that in a future post — I’m more here to make the bold claim that tidying isn’t the point of Marie Kondo’s brand. It’s about having a reverence for your things, a Shintoistic practice of honoring that which is alive around us, and letting the material world be a gateway to animistic sensibilities.

I think this would also solve our need to be in nature in order to feel some connection to a higher power, or to be with people. What if being with your things was enough?

This also helped me with balancing my need to be hypersocial. I’d feel suffocated if it was a rainy day, but then I’d let myself meditatively hold my couch blanket, stroke my TV remote, and feel instantly less lonely because those things were around us.

Even while in Portland, where there are less people in this town for me to hang out with, I’ve felt like my childhood possessions are equal companions as my family.

Those in the West may feel this is insane. Those people may look at Marie and scoff that she couldn’t keep up her own habit, for we tend to look at those who value tidiness as non-human.

For me, I’m curious if she still respects the tenets of Shintoism. I believe she probably does. What I can’t ignore if I close-read her book and don’t listen to the mainstream “dOeS iT sPaRk JoY” discourse that inevitably dominates when anyone brings up her name, is that it was always about having a respect for your things that hoarders and minimalists often don’t have.

So with that, I sit down. I look at my things. I touch them frequently and ask how they’re doing. My 2023 resolution is to do this more.

This was singlehandedly what helped me when I was moving to New York, and I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest every other day because I felt grief for the things I would have to leave behind.

I gave myself a good cry and hugged each and every thing I could before saying goodbye to it. Other things were too painful to say goodbye to, and as I lugged them in my car to Goodwill, I felt immense regret I didn’t properly give them a seeing off. I’ve learned to not do that with the future things, for the heart-centered way of doing it is making the “habits” stick. Tidiness is just a symptom of true reverence and appreciation.

My relationship to my things has always been intense, and by having a relationship that is marked by respect as a better manifestation of typical guilt-driven attachment, I’ve felt myself become healthier overall about detaching. There is a middle ground, I believe.

After I read Marie’s book in college, I felt less crazy about how hard it was to throw things away. My hoarding problem lessened over the years, because I felt she had so many good points that I remixed. Now I’m all about trying to ask things how they feel about you before they buy you. This applied to my crystal collection when I was buying them in LA, but now it’s applying to everything else too. [I’m working on how this can feel with groceries as well, haha.]

I made an effort to restructure my life around being kind and gentle and thoughtful with my things, as if they were part of me. As if parts of my psyche were imbued in them. I saw the comfort in this. It led to me being kind and gentle with all of the other things in my life, including my relationships.

Perhaps this is just the Alexander Technique but for your house. I don’t know. But regardless of how you name it or whether you go as far as I do, I think respecting what we can’t see can often lead to better outcomes with how we also approach life, with a gentle detachment and curiosity. If we’re doing this with our bodies and the forces of nature, why not also with our external material environment?

“Once my clients have learned to treat their clothes with respect, they always tell me, ‘My clothes last longer. My sweaters don’t pill as easily, and I don’t spill things on them as much either.’ This suggests that caring for your possessions is the best way to motivate them to support you, their owner. When you treat your belongings well, they will always respond in kind.”

With that said, I really hope Marie still talks to her things; she’ll definitely need to, if they’re going to help her take care of her three kids!