Below is one of my favorite videos. I watched it for the first of many times last year and I always seem to come back to it. Have a watch – I’ll wait. (It’s under 3 minutes, which translates to .002% of 1 jellybean – well worth it, in my opinion).
I have been thinking a bit about time since my last post about using the KonMari method to discard possessions that do not bring me joy as laid out in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Since that post, I have tackled my closets and completed the process of going through every article of clothing I own, a task incredibly worth what probably totaled one jellybean, but saved me dozens of jellybeans in time worth stressing over clothing and struggling to get dressed.
I have wasted lots of jellybeans. Fighting, yelling, crying, stressing… doing lots of things that do not bring me joy. The message of the book doesn’t only apply to possessions, but to life. It begs the question: if it doesn’t bring you joy, then why do it? We only have so many jellybeans… shouldn’t each one contain joy?
Like the video says, we spend on average 3,202 jellybeans working and 1,099 jellybeans commuting. My dear friend, Kathy who introduced me to this wonderful book, probably spends even more jellybeans commuting since she lives in Delaware and works in Philadelphia. For all those jellybeans, shouldn’t the job bring her joy?
Being that she is such a source of inspiration to me, I invited Kathy to share her thoughts on the subject:
My good friend Anna, who is also a two-time former roommate, told me about The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and asked if I had read it yet. The title alone intrigued me, but she caught my attention when she said she couldn’t stop thinking of me as she read it. “This is intuitive for you,” she exclaimed. She reminded me that while I never owned much when we lived together, I loved every little thing that I did own. I bought the Kindle sample and was captured within those few pages. This is who I used to be, I thought to myself. I bought the book and dove in. This book appeared at a great ‘piggy-back’ point in my journey of figuring out what my next career choice would be. I have experienced this ‘piggy-back’ phenomenon many times when I am working to figure something out. The Universe will send me messages in various forms, usually within a few days of each other to help me in figuring out whatever it is I am puzzling over. I learned many years ago to pay attention to those messages.
I recently brainstormed ideas regarding my decision to change careers (or at least find something closer to home) with a friend’s mom. She ended with telling me that I need to figure out what makes me happy. “Then everything else will fall into place,” she said.
The question of what makes me happy in work has always been a difficult one for me to answer, and I usually end up frustrated at the idea of figuring it out. About a week or so after talking with my friend’s mom, I received the text message from Anna, asking if I had read the book. (Side note: I just found out this week that my friend’s mom who had coached me has read the book and is in the process of reviewing and discarding herself!)
This book gives a concrete action plan for rediscovering what creates joy in your life. It is simple: Does it spark joy? Do you love it? If your answer is an immediate yes(!), you keep it. That’s it. I have found the most profound processing occurs when the answer is not the immediate yes. When we are faced with items that don’t bring us joy, but they have some type of connection to us, we are forced to deal with those emotions. As the author describes, this process is painful. And it is a process.
My greatest observation was when I realized the majority of items in my home bring up an ‘eh’ feeling – I don’t feel strongly for them or against them. This of course mirrors other aspects of my life as well. My current job? ‘Eh.’ Does it bring me joy? Not an immediate yes. So following the method, it’s quite simple. It is time to move on.
So what does bring me joy? As I slowly go through my household items by category, I am reconnecting with the twenty year-old who moved across country with only that which fit in my Corolla; bringing with me only the items I absolutely loved. I am seeing how I have created a life that has moved me away from the core of who I am. Now I have a step-by-step guide to get back that feeling of freedom I once coveted by owning less, but owning everything that I love.
