Photo: Getty Images In the past couple weeks, I have found my mind circling back, again and again, to an article I read in this magazine, about a Japanese tidying guru named Marie Kondo. Her idea, in a nutshell, is this: People should share the spaces they inhabit exclusively with objects — furniture, books, clothing, cooking pans, potted plants — that bring them joy. Everything else is clutter and should be purged forthwith.
We don’t devote ourselves to de-cluttering for all the usual reasons. Inertia, busyness, a sense that other activities — work, dinner, spin class, overseeing homework — are more pressing than weeding closets when a free hour presents. But beneath the excuses, there’s something else — a religious conflict, if you will — at work. My husband and I were each raised in the faith of the “perfectly good.
My father, who is in his mid-70s, can now live comfortably without the pressures of mortgage payments and college bills but he still hates to throw anything away. He loves the family story of a friend’s father, long deceased, who was once an eminent economist at Brown. This man took the faith of the perfectly good to extremes, a wealthy man who wore his canvas tennis shoes until they were full of holes.
There is, in other words, an apocalyptic aspect to the religion of the perfectly good that’s absent in the Kondo way, which might be better characterized as a live-for-now-and-see-what-happens approach to owning stuff. My husband and I have a hard time throwing things away because we were each taught that anything can happen at any time, and you have to be prepared. This is the foundational tenet of the perfectly good.
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