I know it’s super ironic given that Marie Kondo recently confessed to giving up on tidying her once-pristine home but I watched “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” this long weekend. All 8 episodes of it.
The reason was that I invited some peeps to my house today, so I desperately wanted to get rid of my paper trail, so I started watching this show for motivation. I mean, my paper trail seems pretty insignificant compared to the mountains of clothes some of these participants owned!

I did pick up some tips from Marie Kondo and applied them immediately. I went to my closet and actually arranged my wardrobe according to colour. I would have dismissed it as anal behaviour in the past but the message that was overwhelmingly emphasised in the show - know exactly where every item is - shifted my paradigm. So my wardrobe looks like a rainbow now 🌈.

But I think I learnt much more from the participants. Listening to them articulate what Home meant to me made me realise that I never had such aspirations towards my flat. Long-cherished dreams of living around the world made me regard my flat as a pit stop from which I could extricate myself from. But now that I’m a father of two, I need to live fully in the present and make sure that my home is tidy and evokes positive energy.

A mother participant was blaming herself for her daughter’s massive pile of clothing and lamenting about how she wasn’t teaching her to “win at life”. That distracted me from sorting out my paper trail; I went straight to the bookshelves and picked up books to recycle so that my son could retrieve a book easily. Honestly though, there are still too many books on his shelves; I need to streamline them further.
As for my paper trail, believe it or not, I still kept notes and essay outlines I created for my students in my very first job. And the enormous amount of travel articles and brochures to fuel my dream as a freelance travel writer who specialises in Japan. Not to say that I was totally successful but I did clear out two files that could be instantly deployed to store my stuff for my current job. So I guess I am saying goodbye to cultural articles that I never had the chance to write. But it’s okay.

I only have limited capacity to focus on several things now anyway.
Marie Kondo has some weird practices like greeting her hosts’ houses and sliding her finger towards the end, but because she is so likeable and expresses such infectious enthusiasm for her participants, I accepted her quirks readily. The only sad thing is that I have finished the entire series but my paper trail is a mission far from completion!