I’m not through with Marie Kondo and discarding/tidying yet but I must report a techie advance. I took my Icelandic class on SKYPE tonight. I’m about as slow with Icelandic as I am with Skype but I dreaded slogging out to my class by subway and bus in the winter - freezing rain tonight - so I made an effort.

I’ll get better, or so I promised myself. I am still catching up with my assignments for the Screenwriting course I am taking. And of course, it was laundry day today. I still can’t get over Monday/laundry day. It’s not that deeply embedded. I never met a washing machine before I was married. We never owned one. That’s another story which I may have told somewhere. But, in fact, I wrote my first commercial piece of writing about my first laundry day – traumatic! Also lucrative; I got paid for it - the writing not the washing.

This is the trouble with being so old: something always reminds me of something else. Actually, I don’t mind. You may find it confusing but I don’t mind. I’m still here. I’m a tangential thinker. I do go off in tangents, but I usually remember my launching pad. I'm grateful for it. It means my memory is still (mostly) intact. I’m also a parabolic thinker, that is, I think in parables.

Did I mention metaphor? A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? Mine too.

That works. Marie Kondo, “Japan’s pre-eminent guru of tidiness”, and her book about the magic of tidying, were still in my mind, and even though I managed to write two assignments for this course I’m taking, I also managed to tidy up my tool box today.

Kondo says to tidy by category. Instead of trying to empty a room, focus on a specific goal: clothes today, books tomorrow (NO!), well, maybe screwdrivers and hammers and unidentifiable hooks and nails and tacks and things – in short – the toolbox. That’s a nice, collective category. Daunting enough but a less time-consuming project. Kondo says to empty everything onto the floor and then discard as you pick it up. The amount of stuff you put back should be way less than what got poured onto the floor. That way you can avoid buying extra storage for stuff you don’t need to find a place for.

So I dumped the contents of the tool box on a small tarp and went through it all. It took fewer than forty minutes and I got it all sorted and tossed. What a good feeling! Why didn’t I do it ten years ago?

“All you need to do is take the time to sit down and examine each item you own, decide whether you want to keep or discard it, and then choose where to put what you keep.” (I hope my quotes qualify as fair usage.) Kondo says her lifestyle brings her joy. Well, I wouldn’t describe my toolbox triumph as joyful but I do feel good about it.

It gives me hope. More anon.