The Life-Changing Magic of Hurricane Michael

Lately all you see on the internet is Marie Kondo this, Marie Kondo that.  If you don't know who she is, Marie Kondo wrote a bestselling book entitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014) and stars in a new Netflix series called Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.  The essence of Kondo's KonMari philosophy is to keep only that which "sparks joy," and that decluttering your possessions will improve your life.  Full disclosure: I downloaded the book in 2015, but it sits unread in my Kindle app.  I was too busy with all of my clutter to read it if you want to know the ugly truth.

The cleaning out necessitated by Hurricane Michael damage got us going and now we are cleaning out our entire house.  Every cabinet, closet and drawer.  I am appalled by how much stuff we have accumulated over the last 20 years that we don't need, or for that matter, even want.  There's no room for the stuff we love.  Just cleaning out the kitchen cabinets yielded the equivalent of a fully equipped kitchen....things we never used and things we forgot we even owned.

The hurricane taught me an important lesson: what we can't live without and what we need are not always the same thing as what we want.  We are all tidying up, right?  Hurricane Michael did a lot of the work for us-- maybe too well. He didn't have to go so hard in the paint on us, we were happy with our clutter thank you so very much.  

But you know what? There was an awful lot of stuff in my kitchen that sparked absolutely no joy in me whatsoever. Now that entire extra kitchen we had jammed in our cabinets is on its way to a new owner who needs it, and that surely does. 

And that is magic.

Happy Saturday, I'm gonna go clean out a cabinet.*

XOXO

Julie

*Should go without saying but just in case to be clear, I'd take my ridiculously jampacked kitchen cabinets, gross shed, and embarrassingly disorganized garage all back in a heartbeat if it meant no hurricane, 43 people would still be alive, and thousands of people would still have a home or a business and a job.

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