日本收纳女王的整理经 整洁改变人生(下)

JENNY NING WAS self-conscious about being one of Kondo’s only employees who had not yet finished tidying(!). What could Kondo possibly think of an employee representing KonMari Inc. to her American base not having her own house in order? Last year, when Kondo visited San Francisco, she came to Ning’s studio apartment, and Ning said she felt very ashamed when Kondo opened her closet. Kondo would visit San Francisco again to introduce the consultancy and maybe even before, and Ning told me she wanted to tidy and to show Kondo the progress. I asked if I could come along and maybe help Ning complete her tidying.

近藤麻里惠的雇员中有几个还没有完成整理，其中就包括詹妮·宁（Jenny Ning，音），她为此感到有点不好意思。身为KonMari公司的员工，在美国受众面前代表着公司的形象，她自己的屋子却没有收拾得井井有条，这会让近藤怎么想呢？去年，近藤访问旧金山时来到了宁的公寓。宁说，当近藤打开自己的衣橱时，自己羞愧极了。近藤还会再来旧金山，启动这家咨询公司，甚至可能是在那之前。宁告诉我，她打算好好做一下整理，让近藤看到自己的进步。我问她我是否能过来，说不定能帮上她的忙呢。

When Ning was little, she loved to collect things: stamps, stickers, pencils. She was never overwhelmed by her stuff. She thinks of her childhood bedroom as “very happy.” But as she grew into adulthood, she kept buying clothing: far too much of it.

宁小时候喜欢收集东西：邮票、贴纸、铅笔。她从来不会觉得自己的东西是负担。她觉得自己童年时代的卧室是“非常快乐”的。但是成年以后，她不停地买衣服：买得太多了。

She went to work in finance, but she found the work empty and meaningless. She would come home and find herself overwhelmed by her stuff. So she began searching for “minimalism” on the internet, happening on Pinterest pages of beautiful, empty bathrooms and kitchens, and she began to imagine that it was her stuff that was weighing her down. She read philosophy blogs about materialism and the accumulation of objects. “They just all talked about feeling lighter,” she said. Ning wanted that lightness.

一开始她在金融业工作，但她觉得这份工作空虚而又没有意义。回到家里，她总觉得自己被她所拥有的物品压倒了。于是她开始在网上搜索“极简主义”。偶然在Pinterest上看到那些空空荡荡的漂亮卫生间和厨房，她开始感觉自己拥有的物品成了累赘。她读到一些关于物质至上主义和物品囤积的哲学博客。“他们都在讲一种轻盈的感受，”她说。宁也想感受那种轻盈。

And here, at this moment in the story, Ning began to cry. “I never knew how to get here from there,” she said. She found Kondo’s book, and she felt better immediately, just having read it. She began tidying, and immediately she lost three pounds. She had been trying to lose weight forever, and then suddenly, without effort, three pounds, just gone.

故事讲到这儿，宁开始哭泣。“我完全不知道怎么从那种状态达到今天这个样子，”她说。然后，她发现了近藤的书，光是读一读，就让她立刻感觉好了很多。她开始做整理，很快，人就瘦了三磅。她一直在努力减肥，但现在她什么额外的事情也没做，就这么突然一下子瘦了整整三磅。

Ning has thrown away her collections. She wiped her tears and leaned in and told me, like a secret, that she has kept one collection: the stickers. She asked me if I wanted to see her album. She pulled it out from under her bed, pages and pages of Snoopy stickers and stickers of frogs and cupcakes and bunnies in raincoats playing in puddles and Easter baskets. She smiled down at them and touched a few while I thumbed through the pages.

宁已经把自己收集的东西统统扔掉了。她擦干眼泪，凑到我身边，像说悄悄话一样告诉我，她只保留了一种藏品。那就是贴纸。她问我想不想看她的收藏簿。她把它从床底下拿了出来，里面是一页一页的史努比、青蛙和纸杯蛋糕的贴纸，还有穿着雨衣，在水洼里玩耍的兔子，以及复活节篮子。她低头看着它们，脸上露出微笑，我随手翻动时，她还轻轻地抚摸其中的几枚贴纸。

A WEEK LATER I was on another assignment, still using the same notebook from the Kondo story. As I flipped through it, passing through the pages of my notes from my time with Ning, I noticed that a tiny blue butterfly sticker had escaped her collection and landed on a page. When I saw the sticker, I froze and put my finger on it. I had had a sticker album, too. It had stickers that smelled like candy canes and purple. It had bubbly heart stickers and star stickers and Mork & Mindy stickers and Peanuts stickers, too.

一周后我有另一项采访任务，用的还是采访近藤这篇文章时用的笔记本。我随手翻页，翻过采访宁的那次所做的笔记。我突然发现，有一片小小的蓝蝴蝶贴纸从她的收藏里跑到了我的本子上。看到它，我不觉怔住了，伸出手指去抚摸它。我自己也有过贴纸簿，里面的贴纸闻上去好像拐棍糖，带着点紫色的味道。那里面还有心形泡泡贴纸、星星贴纸、“默克与明迪”(Mork & Mindy)贴纸和花生漫画贴纸。

I went abroad for a year to Israel after high school. While I was there, the boiler in my house in Brooklyn exploded and a soot fire destroyed all our possessions. “Everyone is OK, but there was a fire,” my father said when I called. I never saw my sticker album again. I never saw anything again. After the place was cleared out, my mother was able to save a few photo albums, because they were closed when the soot invaded the basement and covered and ruined all the surfaces. When I look at the pictures, I don’t ever notice how young or cute my sisters and I were. I look in the background for the items that lie in the incidental path of my mother’s Canon. I try to think of what my life would have been like if I’d returned home to what I left behind, the way my friends were able to return to their homes to what they’d left behind and keep returning, after they finished college and after they got married and after they had kids. I try to think of who I’d be if I weren’t in the habit of looking at my home before I left it each day and mentally preparing myself for the possibility that nothing I owned would be there when I got home that night. I try to know what feelings my lost objects, which I forget more and more as the years pass, would evoke if I could hold them in my hands, KonMari style, like a new kitten. Some would bring joy and some would not, but I’m not someone who thinks that joy is the only valid emotion. I try to remember what I no longer can because, in terms of my possessions, it is as if I was born on my 19th birthday.

中学毕业后，我去以色列呆了一年。在以色列期间，布鲁克林家里的锅炉爆炸了，烟殆引发的火灾烧掉了我们所有的财物。“大家都好，但是着火了，”我打电话过去时，父亲告诉我。我永远地失去了我的贴纸簿，什么都没有了。现场收拾干净之后，妈妈抢救出几本相册，烟殆侵入地下室后，覆盖并烧毁了所有东西的表面，但相册是合着的。看着那些照片，我注意的不是我和姊妹们过去有多么年轻可爱。我只是看着背景中那些被妈妈的佳能相机碰巧拍到的东西。我试着去设想，如果我能回到幼时的家，看到自己留在家里的那些东西，那样的生活会是什么样？就像我的朋友们可以回家，看到他们留在那里的东西仍然在那里，甚至大学毕业或者结婚生子之后，还都保持原样。我已经养成习惯，每天出门前都要审视家中，做好当晚回来发现自己所有物品都已不见的心理准备。如果我没有养成这样的习惯，现在的我又会是个什么样的人呢？那些我已经失去的东西，随着岁月流逝，也渐渐被我淡忘。但我常想，如果我能再次把它们握在手里，用KonMari的方式，仿佛捧起一只新生的小猫，那会带给我怎样的感受？我想，有些东西一定会带来快乐，而有些则不会。但我不认为快乐是唯一正当的情感。我努力回忆那些我已经不记得了的东西，因为从个人物品的角度来说，我感觉自己仿佛是19岁生日那天才刚刚出生。

The reason I bring this up is to tell you that you could not have any stuff at all, much less too much stuff, and still be totally messed up about it. The reason I tell you this is so that you know that that tiny butterfly sticker has been the same burden to me as any hoarder’s yield. Nostalgia is a beast, and that is either a good reason to KonMari your life, or a terrible one, depending on how you want to live.

我之所以说起这件事，只是想告诉你，就算你什么东西也没有，就算你拥有的东西远远算不上过多，你还是有可能过得乱七八糟。我告诉你这些，是想让你明白，那片小小的蝴蝶贴纸对于我来说，也像任何一个集物癖的破烂儿一样，是一种负担。怀旧情结是一头猛兽，如果你想用KonMari法去整理自己的生活，这既是一个好理由，也是一个坏理由，完全取决于你想怎样生活。

THE LAST TIME I saw Marie Kondo, we were in a hotel room in Midtown, a different one, and still the only visible objects in it were that metal suitcase and her husband’s laptop. But one item had been removed from the suitcase: a spray bottle that she keeps around. She sprays it into the air and the scent signals to her that she is finished working for the day, that her obligations, which seem endless lately, are done. I told her that, to my observation, a company trying to grow the way hers was trying to grow seemed at odds with the personality of someone who required such extreme measures for peace in the first place. “I do feel overwhelmed,” she told me, and she gave me one note of a quiet laugh. People demand a lot of her, not really understanding that you don’t go into a business like tidying if you’re able to handle a normal influx of activity and material. Kondo is not part of a breed of alpha-organizers bent on dominating the world, despite her hashtag. She has more in common with her clients. But when it comes to stuff, we are all the same. Once we’ve eliminated that which does not bring us joy and categorized ourselves within an inch of our lives, we’ll find that the person lying beneath all the stuff was still just plain old us. We are all a mess, even when we’re done tidying. At least Kondo knows it. “I was always more comfortable talking to objects than people,” she told me. At that moment, I could tell that if she had her way, I would leave the hotel room and she would spray her spray and be left alone, so she could ask the empty room if she could clean it.

我上一次见到近藤麻里惠是在中城的一家酒店房间。不是同一个房间。但房间里能看到的唯一几件物品还是只有她的金属旅行箱，还有她丈夫的笔记本电脑。不过有一样东西已经从旅行箱里拿出来了，就是她的喷雾瓶。她喜欢把香氛喷洒在空气中，告诉自己一日的工作已经做完，她那些似乎永远做不完的任务已经完成。我告诉她，据我观察，一家以如此方式追求成长的公司和一个需要采取如此极端方式追求平和的人，似乎有点格格不入。“我确实感到力不从心，”她告诉我，对我静静一笑。人们向她索求很多东西，却不明白，如果你真能处理好日常生活的种种匆忙和繁乱，也就不会从事“整理”这种行业了。尽管有那样的井号标签，但近藤并不是那种一心主导世界的顶级组织者。她和自己的客户之间其实有着更多相似之处。但是说到身外之物，我们都是一样的。一旦丢弃了那些不能给我们带来快乐的东西，拼命地自我归类，我们会发现，那个身外之物底下的人，仍不过是原来旧我。我们所有人都是一团糟，哪怕是完成了整理之后。至少近藤知道这一点。“和东西说话总是比和人说话更让我觉得自在，”她告诉我。在那个时刻，我看得出来，如果按照她的心愿，我应该马上离开这个酒店房间，好让她独自一个人去喷洒香氛，然后询问这个房间愿不愿意被她清理。