Pass It On - Leather Gear and Personal Legacy

This past week anyone who even casually scanned social media would have seen a flurry of memes and commentary about Marie Kondo and her "tidying" message now being made widely accessible through her Netflix show.

In true American consumerism fashion, masses of people piled on Kondo's tidying message with piranha frenzy, especially when they misinterpreted her suggestion about reducing one's book collection. You would have thought she had directed us all to cut off a leg.

What people did was superficially snap judgment her message with barely an iota of understanding of her method's true core values and principles. Falling prey to such group-think is easy.

Thankfully, a friend pointed me to a beautiful article by author Margaret Dilloway in the Huffington Post. Dilloway drills through the veneer of the more obvious traits of Ms. Kondo's tidying strategies and offers us their roots in the lovely Japanese Shinto religion.

Part of Shinto's culture is to imbue objects with their own dignity and specialness. Flowing naturally from the honoring of objects this way is also respecting where we live and work, and therefore the people therein, with a similar type of specialness.

Rather than Kondo's method being one of simply discarding an unwanted item, she suggests giving sincere thanks to the object and passing it on to others if possible, to be put to better use elsewhere, perhaps bringing joy to a new owner.

Halfway through reading Dilloway's article it struck me that the leather communities have had a longstanding practice of passing down leathers, gear and treasured objects to others as a way of letting a valued possession experience new life with a new caretaker.

While I sometimes bristle at any sort of magical spirituality, the Shinto notion that spirits (kami) inhabit everyone and everything resonates nicely with how I've felt when I've worn or used something passed down to me from someone else.