Hedi is currently finding out what she doesn’t want (and that’s pretty fun).
Her shoulders used to carry the weight of all the lives she wasn’t living. They were wearing her down. Neatly kept her in the same organised place. And if anybody asked her what she wanted in life, she’d shrug her shoulders and say ‘Hm, I dunno’ and she hoped the weight would just slide off eventually. She wasn’t living these lives because she wasn’t sure if they were the right ones to live. She thought she had to choose one. When she was kid people asked her: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And for Hedi it was proven to be the impossible question about how to do the two impossible things: being and growing up. Nobody asked her since.
Her quest for happiness used to be guided by the things she thought she wanted. Education, a degree, a job description, relationships and their potential. And that resulted in a lot of contemplating, weighing up options, thinking in lists of pros and cons, anxiety, new year’s resolutions and detox rituals.
Now she's pursuing happiness through the things that she doesn’t want. It’s a simple method: She’d try everything once. If it didn’t make her happy, she’d cross it off the overwhelming list of possibilities that life has to offer.
Hedi is mary-kondoing her head. Except not really, because her life is neither beige, nor pleasantly shaped - it’s absolutely terrifying, ugly and unpredictable. She’s reverse-mary-kondoing.
Mary Kondo is a 36 y/o Japanese business woman who has made an immensely profitable empire of tossing nostalgia and replacing it with beige objects like Bamboo sake cups or triangle bud vases. She’s feeding a desire for perfect control to a generation of humans that are screaming for healthy boundaries. It’s curious, the human need for a tidy life. To defeat the chaos caused by a privileged life of abundance.
Mary Kondo’s method of building a tidy life is simple and reduced to the objects in the human’s home. She’s trademarked the KonMari™ method and has been successful in placing great importance on ‘being mindful, introspective and forward-looking’ humans and projecting joy and happiness on the objects that surround them.
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The KonMari™ Method, 6 Rules of Tidying
Commit yourself to tidying up.
Imagine your ideal lifestyle.
Finish discarding first.
Tidy by category, not by location
Follow the right order.
Ask yourself if it sparks joy.
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Cherish the things that bring you joy, let go of the rest with gratitude. In Mary Kondo’s world this means organisation and control. Hedi has reversed this method to bring back the chaos into her life. She’s Mary -f*cking- Kondo with six spoonfuls of sugar. She has decided that in every job that must be done there is an element of fun. She has taken control of her pursuit of happiness - supercallifragilisticexpialidociously.
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Hedi’s Reverse-Kondo Method, 6 Rules of Chaos
1. Commit yourself to actually living your life.
Hedi takes a shot, goes all in, de-clutters her path from organisational hazards, red tape and a 5-year plan. The journey is her f*cking destination. If Mary Kondo can tidy and declutter her loft in one go, then Hedi can eat that cake, book that flight, wear those pants on any given day.
2. Don’t imagine your ideal lifestyle.
Hedi doesn’t envision her best life, she doesn’t make everything a turning point. For her nothing lasts forever and she is under no obligation to be the same person she was 5 minutes ago, e.t.c.
Addicts are being told to tell themselves ‘not today’ rather than ‘never again’ to make withdrawal less dawning. Hedi applies that to her lifestyle.
3. Don’t discard things and people.
Hedi tries everything once, learns, shares, and makes encounters with (gr)attitude. She doesn’t label humans toxic. It takes two to make energy toxic. Scientists have found that kindness can be measured on an XY graph along Benefit of the Doubt and Closeness. So it’s on her to dispense it.
4. Change your location.
Instead of de-cluttering her home, she considers just leaving it for a while.
5. Let go of doing things in order.
Hedi has her desert before her main course, she reads the last page of a book first, she makes boys cry, and lets girls get angry. Humans tend to do things in the way they have always been done. But why? As a kid Hedi was told things can’t always be fun and she’d wonder why. The older she got, the less she wondered. Hedi wonders why things are being done in a certain order.
6. Ask yourself if it sparks joy.
Yes, she does that. After she’s tried it. At least once.
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At this point you may wonder if Hedi has found happiness yet. Well, she hasn’t. But she’s living an unpredictable life of beautiful chaos. Without regrets.
geschrieben im Januar, 2021
zuhause, nach dem Aufräumen, Mary Kondo Style