Marie Kondo, a Japanese author, and storage expert seems to have found the secret to happiness: a well-ordered house! Here are some explanations taken from his book, a worldwide success.
At the age of 5, Marie Kondo liked to flip through magazines to observe the interior decoration of houses and, particularly, the storage spaces. Ten years later, the Japanese woman tackled the cleaning of her parent’s home: she tried all the storage methods then available on the market.
Having become an expert in the art of creating orderly spaces, Marie Kondo, now 30, has published a book, The Amazing Power of Tidying Up (April 2015). In Japan, the book was a huge success: it sold more than 1.3 million copies. Worldwide, more than 2.5 million copies have been sold. The tidying queen is the head of a successful business based on the tidying method she pioneered, the KonMari System (from her nickname).
The KonMari system
This one aims to “tidy up in one go, completely and as quickly as possible, starting with throwing away”, can we read in its bestseller. According to the author, her method is infallible, accessible to everyone, and allows you to declutter and organize your space, once and for all. Even better, it makes you happier. How? “Dramatic reorganization of the home brings about dramatic changes in lifestyle and outlook on existence.” Thus, by ordering one’s space, one changes one’s state of mind and lightens one’s life.
The first step in spring cleaning is to throw away. According to Marie Kondo, every object must pass through the hands of its owner, and the latter must ask himself: “Does this object bring me joy?” If the answer is “yes”, we keep it; if it’s “no”, we get rid of it. Does this seem like a subjective and vague criterion to you? “We must keep only the things that affect us, she writes several times over the 240 pages because throwing away and keeping things has only one purpose: to make us happy.”
The opinion of a psychologist
Happy, really? According to Rémi Côté, a psychologist, no doubt: counting calls for calm. “You feel calm when you look at the horizon,” he says. Why? Because, according to the theory of evolution, the primate liked to walk in the grassland, where he could see predators coming. He was then not worried, not threatened. This is what the horizon, like a seaside, evokes. Jocelyne Vien, the professional organizer at the head of Zone Atlantis , also believes that a tidy house makes you happier. “When you have everything close at hand, you waste less time and your life is easier,” she points out.
From there to saying that everyone – artists as well as families with young children – must live in a refined environment, there is only one step… which Mr. Côté does not cross. “Some creative geniuses find themselves in a cluttered office,” he admits. It takes spaces that call for calm as it takes places to take action, in short, a balance.
