Whoops, Almost

I think there comes a time in your life as a minimalist that you run out of things to do first, and finally (probably), you tackle your sentimental clutter. I’ve said before that keeping photographs was a weakness for me, and that was no underestimation.

Before

 

When my father died, I was a kid and I inherited a pretty hefty collection of pictures that he had printed out all throughout my childhood, and to him, almost every day was a special occasion that needed to be commemorated in print. To get a little heavy here, for a second, I think he always feared the day when the two of us no longer lived together.

Among the collection of things that I found when I looked into the box after his death, I found records of commendations that I received in elementary school and medals that I got from reading programs, clothing  that I must have worn when I was the size of a potato, and every terrific kid bumper sticker that I had been given in school. My dad’s hoarding was the beginning of sentimental hoarding for me.

I started out with all that, and in his honor and memory, I added to the group of things every time something of note happened. All of my birthday cards, papers that I had done exceptionally well on, and more photographs were all stuffed into the box until I graduated from college and then needed a total of five plastic containers to hold it all. I have photos.

A few weeks ago, feeling like I had run out of things to declutter, I finally took it upon myself to clean it out. I decided that I wanted to take my sentimental clutter from five containers to three. It’s not a big goal, but I met it. It took hours and was aided by a drink or two. I know that people believe that containing their closets is the hardest part of minimalism, but for me, it was getting rid of a pair of binoculars.

You know, the saying is: You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.

And that is the anti-mantra of the lifestyle that I’ve been undertaking in the past month, but I went through the day’s task with a practicality that it has always been easy for me to adopt. My father had owned one of the worst pairs of binoculars I had ever seen, and there was absolutely no reason for me to keep them. I couldn’t even remember a single time he used them. They sat in one container for years at a time, completely forgotten, and so they needed to go.

I put them into the donation pile and hauled them away a couple of days later to the local Goodwill.

However, immediately after we dropped them off, we needed to shop for jeans and so the two of us, Tom and I, went into the store-section and there, at the glass top table where they keep their unclassifiable objects, my father’s binoculars were sitting, having already been processed in the amount of time that it took Tom to find a pair of khakis. They were being sold for nine dollars.

I thought about buying them back. It was a very strong urge. After all, they hadn’t been too expensive, and I had already met my decluttering goal.

It must have been divine intervention that kept me from taking out my wallet.

Honestly, it sounds a lot more like a cautionary tale than it should. I really had been upset at the time. It was the duty of Goodwill to take what I no longer needed, but seeing them with a price tag was sacrilegious.

At the end of the story, I got home, and I waited a few days, and then I wrote a blog all about the experience. What I want people to take away from this blog is that owning my father’s things didn’t keep him from being dead. He is still not coming back, and as nice as those binoculars were on a sentimental level, they didn’t serve me anymore. They don’t serve me more than the photographs of him do or the real memories that I have of him.

I knew the binoculars before I gave them away, and I know them after, but I don’t need them, and now they will belong to someone who will use them far better than I ever did.

After: the utility closet still needs culling, but it certainly is an improvement.

 

Empty Bookshelves

There are about a million different ways to transition to a minimalist lifestyle and a million different ways to exhibit your minimalism to yourself or others.

You don’t have to get rid of all your possessions to become a minimalist at all.

You don’t have to have white walls in your home or dress in only neutral colors. Your countertops don’t have to be bare and neither do your bookcases.

It’s all about finding a way to live simply according to your own standards. Your brand of minimalism probably looks completely different from mine, and that’s cool. I like having less than 15 hangers in my closet. There are people who dip no lower than 50 and people who only have one hanger that they use only for their winter coat and both of those people can be minimalists.

There are several different brands of the lifestyle. I’ve read about people who eat minimalistically, or only practice the lifestyle in their closets or on their laptop and there are those who have numbered their belongings and have 100 or fewer things in their lives total.

One of my favorite things about the minimalistic community is that you aren’t considered better than others who are practicing the lifestyle if you have less than they do. It’s meant to be a choose-your-own-adventure sort of experience. It’s the exact opposite of keeping up with the Joneses because you aren’t trying to keep up with anyone and neither are you trying to measure your progress through the things that you own.

The saying is, after all, that you’ll go broke trying to keep up with the Joneses.

I’m not yet certain what path I want to take, but I know it’s starting with my home and has, in turn, transferred into my digital life. It’s just Facebook, but it’s been extremely gratifying to know that I will no longer be receiving game and app invitations and that all those friend requests that I have been sitting on are no longer waiting for me. I stopped following pages that were meant to provide me with quantities of entertainment more than quality stuff. And now my laptop desktop is almost empty.

My current desktop is much more relaxing.

At this point in the journey, Tom and I have probably culled somewhere around 20 percent of what we had when we began, and really, we’re nowhere close to being done. For others, it would be almost unreasonable to go further than that. For us, it’s really only a beginning. Things in the apartment still feel crowded.

We began the emotional process of decluttering by identifying our priorities and then deciding how minimalism was going to impact our reaching them.

1. Mental Health- Moving will be easier, there will be less daily maintenance of our belongings, and it will be easier to find things we’re looking for.
2. Eating Conscientiously- We’ll have more time to dedicate to cooking and baking (two of our hobbies) and we’ll buy less and be focused on consuming in order to eliminate food waste.
3. Saving Money- Consuming fewer items, having to store fewer items, and knowing what we do and don’t need will allow us to reallocate more money into savings.

As someone who’s considering the lifestyle partly as a way to decrease anxiety, there is much that needs to be done, and it’s easy to want to tackle all of the clutter in every part of the apartment at one time, but decluttering is done most efficiently through mindfulness. In order to handle things in a practical way, I remember the priorities that I’ve outlined. The anxiety I have about how clean the house is can be aided by having empty countertops, but isn’t aided by making sure that my wardrobe is tiny and put away. As someone who has anxiety about getting ready in the mornings, I can be aided by having a capsule wardrobe that eliminates the worry about whether or not my clothing matches. (My wardrobe will be the subject of another entry.)

Minimalism can be about getting rid of all of your things and starting over or it can be about getting control of one aspect of your life. Neither of these purposes is more worthy than the other. It’s a lifestyle that I’m practicing in order to add value over quantity in my life. For someone else, it may just be about being able to walk across the floorboards in their home without tripping over something.