TIDINESS IN HOME MANUAL

It became a place for us to rest and recover from our exertions in the outside world. Home began to provide us with a sense of security and stability in a wider environment that is beyond our control. Home became the arena in which our children learn to become adults, and the hub within which our most significant social relationships are formed, shaped and nurtured.

As the site for the sharing and preparation of food, a home or home base became the focus of our activities. Beginning about 2 million years ago, the feeding and training of these energy-hungry and slow-to-develop brains required fundamental changes in how our ancestors lived. Underlying the drive towards home was the evolution of a brain that is about three times larger than that seen in our closest ape relatives. The evolutionary journey towards home took us from the ape-like practice of never sleeping in the same place two nights in a row to having home be the centre of our lives. Feelings for home emerge from rest and restoration, comfort and security. These background emotions, and the feelings we experience with them, are about keeping track of our own bodies, maintaining homeostasis. Feelings for home are expressed less in relation to the ‘big’ emotions, such as fear, anger or surprise, but more in terms of what the neurologist Antonio Damasio has called ‘ background emotions’. Over millions of years, both our biological evolution and our cultural propensity to make things have shaped us to be not only homebodies but homeminded as well. The origins of these deep-seated feelings for home likely date back deep into our evolutionary history. Homes are so intimately connected to how people see themselves that to reorganise a home is to change how one lives. But as many readers discover, Kondo’s book goes beyond being just a guide for cleaning house: it can also be seen as a blueprint for rebuilding a life. She provides a guide for culling what we already have, organising what we keep, and limiting the acquisitive tendencies that threaten to fill (or re-fill) our living spaces with more and more things. She suggests that our home environment should not be a repository for limitless amounts of stuff, but that we should surround ourselves only with what we really need, along with those items that bring us ‘joy’.

TIDINESS IN HOME MANUAL

Kondo’s book is ostensibly a manual for home improvement. Is your house tidier than it used to be? If it is, then you have probably read Marie Kondo’s international bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011).

Tidiness in home