Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
StIs keeping tidy, throwing away the superfluous, a virtue or an obsessive form of control? I asked myself this while reading the parable of Marie Kondo, the Japanese guru who made success with books and TV programs that taught how to tidy up the house.
Well, the lady, now 38 years old, she disowned herself, admitting, upon the birth of her third child, that a little chaos is healthy and acceptable.
Let’s face it right away: the level of disorder that we are able to tolerate is absolutely subjective, to the point that what may seem tidy to me may not appear so to others.
Let me give you a personal example: my house is full of objects, many of which come from my many travels. Everything has its place, which I tend never to change. Yet I’m sure to the discerning eye the overall effect is chaotic.
I deduced that my idea of order consists in giving things what for me is “their place”: every morning I leave the house making sure there isn’t a single shirt thrown on the bed or a cup in the sink.
But mine is just an illusion: in fact, I have discovered that things take their place independently of my will. There are boxes of medicines or diaries that I have placed on a shelf with the idea of finding a definitive location for them but which, thanks to my inability to tidy them up, have earned themselves a stable place where they shouldn’t have been.
That’s it then the place of things is not what actually exists but what we allow them to have. What creates the chaos effect is just that.
In his own way, without bothering the psychologists, this is a metaphor for what happens in our mind when we have an unsolved problem (I’m referring to something serious, not to daily tasks): at first we feel the need to solve it, but if we don’t do it right away, in the end we never see it again.
The accumulation of unsolved problems produces chaos in the mind that we perceive without controlling it. And here, dear Marie Kondo, you were right: «People cannot change their tidying habits without first changing their way of thinking».
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