More insights gathered from Kondo’s advice.

I have owned Marie Kondo’s book (The Llfe-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Ten Speed Press, 2014) for about three years now, and read it a few times, but i didn’t take it seriously until a couple of months ago when I tidied my sock drawer. Wonderful! And then on New Year’s Day I gave my T-shirts and sweaters and shawls a new lease, as they say, though I will have to rethink my approach to the shawls. They are tidy but I’m still piling them. They’re supposed to be vertical. It’s not just me. My clothes have to be happy, too. I must keep trying.

It’s not going to be easy; it gets harder. Kondo puts the things we have to tidy up into five main categories: clothes first, then books, papers, komono (miscellany) and, finally, mementos.

This is where we separate and why I had to re-read the book several times to try to get over my negative attitude. When she comes to books, her first words are ”Put all your books on the floor” and I wrote in the margin a heavily inked, capital-lettered refusal:

NO!