The Joy of Chaos
Of all the fads that have come and gone over my lifetime – and there have been many – there is only one that has held my attention long enough for me to form a rounded, rather unfavourable, opinion of it.
As one not given to following any kind of trend (mainly due to a lack of enterprise on my part), I have generally barely cast any of them a side-ways glance. Fads fade, and it’s this transient quality about them that has always earned my indifference.
This one fad, however, caused such a worldwide sensation, such a cult-like following, that it was impossible to fob off. I became engrossed by people’s enthralment of it, confused by the almost religious conviction of its benefits, fascinated by the frenzied uptake of its philosophy.
What was that fad? It was Marie Kondo and her compulsive cleaning craze.
For the life of me, I cannot understand what could possibly be going through people’s minds in following this woman’s maniacal obsession with neatly folded and hidden away items. Are people’s lives really so messed up that they need to metaphorically tidy themselves through the medium of tiny boxes and crisply folded, colour coordinated underwear drawers?
It strikes me as kind of odd that anyone would want to live in a house that shows no signs of life, the very thing that makes a house a home. Life is messy and cobbled together, it’s a patchwork of mismatched events and memories, it’s the past, present and future falling over each other.
Real life is not perfectly ordered no matter how much we want it to be, and I hardly think throwing out half of your possessions and folding the other half into neatly stacked containers is going to make it so.
To me a beautiful home is one that is interesting, and an interesting home is one that is full of real life stories on display. What I love is when a home is filled with a mix of old and new thrown together in a kind of ordered chaos that shouldn’t work on paper but, in reality, does.
As someone who comes from a design background and who used to believe that a coordinated home was the epitome of style, I now feel that too much purpose lacks soul. Who really wants to live in a display showroom?! Not me! Real life is so much more than carefully arranged objects.
Real life is your grandmother’s dining table, your father’s camera, the rug you bought in Istanbul, the rare prints you bought in Rome, the original artwork you picked up in that cute little Tasmanian market, the crayon drawing your niece drew of you and her under a rainbow, it’s every postcard from every art exhibition you’ve ever been to, it’s the dried flowers from that bouquet your friend sent you when you were grieving, it’s work mixing with home, it’s your boyfriend’s slippers waiting for him to come over, it’s all the books you’ve ever read and all the ones you’ve yet to read.
Real life is anything but neat and tidy, it’s out in the open, it’s loud and brash, it’s to be used and abused. Real life is chaos and it’s joy. It’s not just a spark, it’s a freaking fireworks display!
I think we would all feel liberated if we simply embraced the joy of chaos.