More or Less

About a year ago I moved to a new house. My house at the time had a large built in wardrobe, although not large enough. I had piles of clothes and shoes and accessories draped around my room in all sorts of nooks and crannies. They were stuffed in drawers or boxes or hanging for dear life with a number of other garments on the same clothes hanger. My shoes were piled high on top of one another and I was dreading the day when I needed that pair of ballet flats right on the bottom of the pile. At the time though I thought it was fine, normal even. Everyone has 80 pairs of shoes, right?

In the few weeks before the move to my new house, I had to pack. Packing of course was quite the mission considering all the stuff I had. During the packing process, I found many things, mostly junk like moisturisers I never used, old make-up, headbands that I wore when I was seven? Most of the stuff I never (or rarely) used in my current house and certainly wouldn’t use in my new house. I still however spent days sourcing boxes and packing these useless nothings ready to lay dominant in my new house.

When I moved into my new home, it was very exciting. This was a new space to fill with new memories and, of course, with old stuff. I spent about six months in the new house sorting through my things, arranging them to look tidy and piling everything on top of each other, finding new corners and crevices to store my things. But one day everything changed.

I was searching through Pinterest and I saw a picture of a clear bedroom. The bedroom just had a bed, a clothes rack and some drawers. That’s it. I remember looking at this picture and thinking, “WHERE ARE ALL THEIR THINGS?” “Why don’t they have any piles of things everywhere?” “What is that? Like 30 items of clothing hanging up?”. I didn’t understand. How could this be a thing, obviously no one really had a room like that. This was just for Pinterest to make the picture look good. I clicked on the website link and it took me to a website about being a Minimalist. This blew my mind. This picture of this bedroom that I saw could be real! It could be MY reality! The idea of not having to navigate my way through my mountains of belongings forever, enslaved by my things as though they were worth more than gold, made me very excited. I spent the next week reading all the websites that I could find on minimalism. I found that there were many benefits to the minimalist pie and I wanted a piece.

This takes me to today. It was 6 months ago when I decided that I wanted to be a minimalist and rid myself of the clutter in my life that dragged me down. I wanted to start this blog to help people like me, who were trapped by their belongings, without realising that they can live without stuff! What a load off (literally)! What peace is found in that freedom! There is joy present from the energy that can be found in other parts of life that aren’t our things! Our life is so consumed by wanting, needing and holding onto our belongings without really considering why we have them, why we invest time and energy in them, and what we actually gain from keeping them. Follow me on my journey (and hopefully yours) to realising that there is so much more to gain from not having more stuff.

#Personaljourney #Minimalism