Last week an unusual video popped up on my Facebook timeline multiple times. This happens often because my friends and I are “birds of a feather….and of course….we think together”.
It makes sense that if I find something of interest, that my friends will as well, and thus the sharing begins on social media. It spreads quickly and can make the rounds of social media feeds with the speed of an S.T.I.
Last week there was a video of a woman folding a plastic grocery bag. Yes…..she actually did an instructional video on how to fold a plastic grocery bag. With almost a religious reverence, this woman flattened and folded and created this little triangular plastic package (which looked like a miniature flag folded to be handed off to someone graveside or a spanakopita pastry pocket).
I have attached a youtube video of something similar to what I had watched.
I watched the video and thought to myself, “There but for the grace of Prozac, go I”.
The plastic bag folding insanity is just another toe dipped into the bucket of “got too much time on your hands” KonMari Method of living.
Before you think that I am going to bash this entire anal-retentive way of living, I will admit….I am only lashing out because I am jealous. Jealous that someone has the time and energy to fold plastic bags and stand them up in a drawer; jealous that someone looked underneath their kitchen sink at the piles and piles of bags and thought, “there has to be a better way”. I do that too you know….I have moments rife with flashes of good intentions….but then…… SQUIRREL!
The funny thing is, that I traveled to my daughter’s home later that same week and after saying hello and remarking on how clean and tidy her home was, I started to say, “Hey did you see the video of the…..” and she interrupted with “plastic bag folding? Yes!!!! Look in the kitchen and see what I did”.
I poked my head around the corner from the living room to the kitchen and I could see her plastic bag container still affixed in the same place on the wall directly above the recycling bin. What I didn’t see were bags puking out from every orifice of the container. Instead…..I saw teeny, tiny little triangles of plastic artfully arranged in the plastic bag container.
“I did it yesterday”, she said with a smile, knowing that I am probably going to mock her incessantly after the fact.
Now….this is a girl who only a few years previous to this, would not remember to pick up the towel in the bathroom. This is a girl who came into the front door and dropped her backpack, her purse, her hat, her gloves, the dog leashes, her shoes and her BPA free water bottle in a continuous trail that stretched into the kitchen. THIS girl sat for GAWD knows how long and folded plastic bags into little triangles?
Hell I was impressed. I couldn’t even come up with a sarcastic comment (at the time…..later I came up with something good).
The fact that she watched that short video and was prompted to begin organizing her life, beginning with the unseemly display of plastic bags in her kitchen, was inspiring!
I folded one as well. The first one didn’t turn out perfectly, but it was not bad. Then I folded another and then another and then I worked myself into a Zen-like rhythm of flattening, smoothing and folding. In moments I had completed 3 tiny plastic Spanakopita’s and I felt an odd sense of comfort knowing that there was some sense of order amongst the plastic.
Now I know what the fuss was about! It was the sense of calm that you feel when you created order out of disorder.
Returning home a week later I looked at MY plastic bag collection under the sink with a renewed sense of purpose. Think of the room that I would make in my life if I simply folded those damn bags (yes…..this is a metaphor for all the junk drawers of my life) into organized triangles!
The plastic bags represented everything in my life that had been frustrating me lately: The pile of paperwork on my kitchen table, the cutlery drawer near the sink, the towels in the bathroom, the makeup strewn all over my en-suite.
So I sat and folded…and folded….and folded. I sat in front of the television and I found my rhythm as I folded every one of those bags.
And do you know what?
It felt good.
JUDY KUCHARUK 