Regrouping
08 February 2014
I woke up one morning, took an unbiased look around my room, and realized that you’d be hard pressed to recognize me as much of a minimalist based on its appearance alone.
While it’s still true that basically everything I own (excluding necessarily large items like bed, bookcase, and desk) would all fit in my car, there are surely more things that could still be discarded. . That’s certainly a lot less physical baggage than most people, but I still like there is too much clutter.
Some of it comes from lack of a convenient yet unobtrusive place to keep clothes I’m planning to wear again. I definitely need a better place for organizing (ultimately filing out of sight or discarding) new papers that come into my life; there are still some important things that require the death of trees despite my best efforts.
I suppose there comes that point in any aspiring minimalist’s life where he/she feels like a fraud, like they’ve accepted that new thing into their space that will prove to be the tipping point. (Or worse yet, that their actions don’t match their words, which is always an uncomfortable feeling when you have the brutal self-honest to recognize it).
While I definitely like having fewer things to keep up with, store, and maintain, it’s always been about more than just the physical possessions. I still don’t subscribe to any particular number of belongings that should be a rigid maximum, I just try to be honest about the true necessity of what I do decide to keep and more importantly try to make sure that I have made an actual decision on what does stay.
(Next post… minimalist stress management, a topic dear to me of late in the wake of a workload increase due to staffing shortages at my IT job)