Tidying up with Zen

Thoughts on Marie Kondo, then, and learning to live the life you have.

I want to talk to you today about Zen. Lately, I have been reading Marie Kondo book Spark Joy, the companion to her original book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. One of the earliest passages in this book struck me, reminding me of the way in which Zen can help influence your life. (In this case, I am using Zen in a very specific way, mind, disassociating it to some degree from elements of traditional ritual and religion, and cutting to a universal concept that I believe resides within the practice).

Marie Kondo says:

When people ask me whether it's best to tidy before or after moving, I always say “Before!” If you haven't even found a new house yet, then start tidying right away. Why? Because it's the house you live in now that will lead you to your next house.
[…]
So if you wanted to meet a beautiful home that is just right for you, take good care of the one you live in now.

It's like this with Zen as well. Learning to practice Zen is not actually about learning how to sit, or how to breathe, or how to meditate “correctly.” In the same way that an artist in training must learn how to use the pencil in a very basic way, or how to create depth through a specific brush stroke, or how different colors blend on the page depending on the wetness of the paint and the type of paper used, all of the trappings of Zen, such as searching and breathing correctly, are simply an element of the larger process. They are not the process itself.

And yet they serve a function in much the same way as the process of tidying that Mary kondo describes in the first paragraph of her quote, above. Learning the basic elements of Zen, and a Zen meditation, serve the purpose of helping you tidy be life that you have.

But it gets far more interesting. And this is where the metaphor breaks down and alters in a really fantastic way. For many meditators there is an implicit goal within the active meditation. Many people study meditation to reach some specific end, some “goal”. As someone might search for a newer and better house, some people search for a newer and better internal self. However, if that alone is the driving force of meditation, one will always find themselves encountering the same clutter from “house to house,” from moment-to-moment in their life.

So, meditating is actually about taking care of the life you live in now. This is what the Zen master Dogen said many hundreds of years ago:

“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”

All of those elements of “tidying up” Are simply ways of helping us realize that we are already here, and that there is actually nothing to realize beyond that — that our life is exactly what it is. And that this is okay.