The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing / Marie Kondo

RATINGS

Overall: 4 / 5 stars

Text Level: Easy

Entertainment: Medium

Self-Help: High

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help, Productivity, Psychology, Spirituality

Page Count: 213

Is this book right for my inmate and me?

Those that lack self-confidence and have lives filled with unorganized clutter around the house that they can’t seem to ever get clean can find help in this book.

Buy on: Amazon / Barnes & Noble

Review By: Blackbird (Inmate)

Tidying your life can bring you inner peace.

An individual with an organized living space has an organized mind. Marie Kondo writes a book for people wishing to tidy up their homes, but also provides readers with a philosophy of how to unclutter their minds. We often don’t see that the items we bury ourselves with at home in fact stand in the way of our own mental health.

Kondo leads readers on a path to organize and clean their living spaces while at the same time gaining a better understanding of who we truly are.

Simply writing with easy-to-follow steps, Marie Kondo creates all the necessary plans for anyone wanting to better clean their homes. Whether folding clothes or emptying out the kitchen, each step of the cleaning process is clearly explained and gives the rationale behind the process. The author makes the cleaning process seem easy and fun for the reader.

Surprisingly, the most impactful part of the book I found was the amount of self-reflection and spiritual awakening that takes place in the cleaning process. Kondo works to impart a deeper level of understanding of the importance of the items we buy and in turn raises the appreciation for the things we choose to keep. Many of the principles taught by Kondo show mindfulness of the relationship between the owner and their items. Realize that is alright to let things go because they have already completed their heavenly devoted journey to serve. This provides the reader a deeper understanding of their own place in the world and what their purpose must be. Kondo wants the process of cleaning to be a starting point of a change in the readers’ lives, where they can envision the clean life they dream of. By visualizing a life of purpose, organized and free of clutter, it can become a reality in all aspects of living that work for us.

For inmates, being able to better organize our living space where we see value in it is a step to creating a life of balance that many of us need. Many of us come from homes of clutter where we have spent our lives constantly filling our world with useless things we want at the moment without much thought. Practicing the skills provided by Kondo in our cells with the minimal things we have can work up to building a healthy routine that we can carry to our homes when we return. It can also teach us to better appreciate the few items we have in jail so we can realize better the value of all that we are lucky to have at home.