Discarding does not come naturally to book people.

Try being a half-caste comic book/book person with a compulsion to collect and a dash of O.C.D. (What do you mean you don’t shelve your comics alphabetically by publisher then format then title?)

But something overcame me in mid-January. It may have the look of fear, disgust and amusement that some friends had when they saw the state of my room:

What are you looking at? Multiple to be read piles are healthy and good for you. It sets goals and is ambitious in a totally achievable way . . .

It may have also been the desire to purge my life after the dumpster fire of a year that was 2016.

Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . I was growing up and the idea of living with less was becoming appealing.

Nagisa Tatsumi’s The Art of Discarding is the book that inspired Marie Kondo’s legendary book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. You can see why Kondo was so affected by this book. The writing is economic, the concepts are clear in theory and in execution and most of all it touches on our relationship with self.

How can we expect to be present and clear headed when physically our lives are a mess? When I reevaluated my relationship with what the “things” I owned, I realised how dysfunctional it was to formulate an identity around possessions. Not only was it dysfunctional it was downright unhealthy.

If all this talk about mindfulness is putting you off. Let me lay out for you.  I sold some books and made some hella dollar bills out of it AND this is what my room looks like now:

The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi is out now.