Michael informed me there's a KonMari line of products you can buy at the Container Store. "Indispensable products" for your "tidying journey", designed by Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
I have liked Kondo's teaching: clear the clutter, keep what you love.
But that she is creating more stuff, more mass-produced, spendy stuff, as "solutions" to create harmony and calm, (so the ad copy says), in a world that is drowning in stuff?
That doesn't seem like a solution at all.
It seems like more of the same, but covered in linen.
Here is the KonMari Method™ Harmony Linen Storage Box.
I painted it.
The copy says the box is a "joy-sparker", so I added a plug.
It doesn't have a plug, really. Or a lid.
The Product Information says, "The interior is uncluttered...".
Yes. It's a box.
WHAT CAN WE BUILD INSTEAD?
All the creative mending that's going on in recent years is a better response to all the crap in the world. It's not about making everything look clean, it's about living with the mess.
The drive to purity can be dangerous. How can we get rid of the inconveniences of life?
Turns out, blasting living problems with antibiotics doesn't work so well in the long run. The interior is cluttered--necessarily so!
Could we work to incorporate them better somehow?
Julia's mending shows what that can look like. From her Instagram, here's a sweater she bought already holey at the (my) thrift store that is a continual state of mending:
Visible mending can seem a bit precious, a bit twee, but look at how it works if you apply it to other things,
if you extend the idea of mending a sweater:
it expands into a whole way of solving problems, from relationships to climate crisis.
If you extend the "solutions" of KonMari Products,
those linen boxes get dented and dirty and you're back where you started in the search for purity.
