You are either calmed by cleaning, or you are stressed by it. Either experience is fine, and because I am not a self-help guru I am not here to tell you that one is better than the other. I am also not here to tell you that I am better than you because I happen to be one of the people who finds cleaning calming, although that is true and my countertops and baseboards can prove it.
However, even if you are a person who doesn’t find their anxieties ebbed by the artificial lemon scent of Pine-Sol or are someone who isn’t at least a little bit aroused by the sight of crisply organized drawers, I still believe this journal documenting a week Marie Kondo’s life will bring you some peace.
For The New York Times vertical Like A Boss, Kondo documented a week in her life and wow, it did not disappoint. I am strongly considering reading it in its entirety every morning as a daily meditation, because although it details levels of precision and visions of serenity I could never hope to achieve, even just reading them put me at ease.
6:30 a.m. The first thing I did was light incense to purify the air and energy in my home. I went into the yard, stretched a bit and then picked some lemons. I made myself a cup of fresh lemon and hot water and then meditated to start my day. We just introduced some new self-care items in our online shop, and I’ve been using the meditation cushion.
I don’t, nor will I probably ever have, a lemon tree in my backyard, although it is one of my great dreams, but even just reading that paragraph centered me in ways no meditation ever has before. Also, shout out to her plugging her own online store in the intro. I’m still obsessed with the fact that she convinced us to throw everything away only to sell it back to us.
Of course, Kondo is a business owner, and so there are details of her work-life, which somehow only managed to soothe me further if I’m being honest.
4 p.m. It stopped raining, so my husband and I went for a stroll on a hiking trail near our house. This is an important time for us as business partners. Rather than sitting in chairs, we prefer to walk and talk out our ideas. We went over upcoming projects, global business strategies and shared takeaways from interesting articles that we’ve read. We have a team Slack channel dedicated to market trends, and it’s helpful to discuss these — they spark great conversation.
Honestly, at this point, I’m just looking for the audiobook version of this interview so I can have it read to me while I keep my eyes closed and pretend I too have a business partner slash husband to go on post-rain walks with. On a subsequent walk that week they didn’t talk business because it was their wedding anniversary, so they only talked about what they love about each other. I think I levitated off my couch while reading this.
Perhaps I am alone in finding this particular brand of domesticity-porn to be my relaxation kink, but I think there are more of you out there. I will admit that, for a moment, my palms got a little sweaty thinking about the unattainable levels of precision and order I was reading through. But then I remembered that no one is perfect, and I visualized myself walking into my backyard to pick a lemon off of a tree, and for a moment everything felt alright again.