Around late spring last year, I chanced upon my future lifestyle Guru. Mary Kondo, the Japanese decluttering diva made her debut in the land of the free and the brave, while I was away on my globe trotting. One has got to give credit to 'the attention span of a toddler' that kicks into moi intermittently, cause that spree of surfing the world wide web landed me before Ms.Kondo..I also had a norm defying nesting phase at that time, right before my baby made her appearance, and in that phase, I did my humble part in economy stimulus and contributed to the rising stocks of Amazon.com by ordering more books than I possibly could read. 'The life changing magic of tidying
up' thus made into my mail box and changed my life, once and for all.
Years ago, I had mastered the craft of reading inbetween the lines..in a good way ofcourse, and eversince, my thinking hardware had been formatted to excel at the same. While Kondo's 'Konmari method' as she calls it made me ruthlessly weed out remotely useless clutter from every nook and crevice of my home, it was a total cleanser of the intangible baggage I carried around in my mind and heart. The end result was a very liberating version of me that got rid of the last traces of the middle child syndrome. I let go of every unnecessary though, every petty hurt and truly experienced an epiphany of sorts. "Drop your stories" - I heard a wise friend's voice in my head - and move on to what sparks joy. Be it what you put on your outside, or inside...my simple life got simpler. It gave me the effects of transendental meditation.
Konmari method has a Zen like aftertaste to it. While She was speaking about the material cleanse, I underwent a deeper cleanse that has lived up to the overused cliche in the title of the book. There was a generous dose of supplement books by great thinkers of my time that enhanced the experience of the cleanse for me, miraculously, all of the lessons fell together at the perfect moment. From Michael Singer's cognitive psychology, Don Miguel Ruiz's Toltec wisdom to Charles Gross, the totally random kid on Youtube culminated my whole soul experience to simply simplify the soul though none of them lectured about it. Sometimes, what you are given and what you have taken do not matchy match . We all seem to be in a chase of complexity...at the end, most of it wouldn't really matter - AT ALL.
It could possibly be my witnessing the face off with mortality upclose around me in the past year, but our lives are too short to be little. Drop them stories, declutter, rearrange and Live :-)