*Note: I found this as a draft. Skimmed through it and decided to publish it as-is, to serve as a snapshot of what i was like at that time (uh-oh didn’t see the date before clicking it open)
Let’s talk about a few things!
- Things
I’ve been going kinda all out to throw out/recycle a lot of my things, to shave down my possessions to as few as i can. And i find the less i have the better i feel. It’s as though your mind leaves invisible web lines to all the things in your life, physical or otherwise and so there’s always that tension from the things that you own but might not even be using or thinking about.
Getting rid of things also helps free up my feelings. I’m no longer bound to keeping things because i feel i owe it to anyone or that i’m afraid i’d forget something. I used to have a box of cards and little gifts from people. I asked myself why i kept them… i know these people love me, i never doubted it. I have not, in years, come to this box to cheer myself up. It’s not like i meet these people and they go ‘hey how’s that card i sent you last year, it still doing fine? Lemme see!’
In short i had no reason to keep those many things and they were taking up space. I threw ’em out. It also helped me reaffirm my belief that if something is truly important then it will always be in your heart. There are some tiny exceptions, but because they’re tiny i’m willing to make space for them. (A secret benefit to throwing out seemingly important things is that the moment you stare at it, contemplating, you are kind of forming a strong memory which you can then hold on to instead of the object itself. Not sure if this is always the case but i’m writing from experience)
Once i have way less things i need way less storage! That frees up space, makes organising easy and makes searching for anything a breeze. My home isn’t a warehouse so i don’t see why i need to dedicate so much space to shelving or cupboards to stow away things that hardly see the light of day anyways.
2. Life
This is related to the previous point. We don’t need much in life to get by happily and contentedly. But for a myriad reasons many of us think we need this and that. When we were researching to renovate our new place, people kept telling us about ‘feature walls, shoe cabinet, TV console’ yada yada yada. It’s like there was a prescription for homes. None of that is really necessary.
We’re not gonna have a TV (costs too much but why spend when each of us has a laptop, why pay for a cable TV subscription when there’s the internet and actually why watch TV when it’s so full of crap). No TV then means no TV console as well and that’s 3 costs eliminated.
Next, there’s no need for a humongous shoe cabinet if we only have a few pairs of shoes each. Besides, i’ve seen slimmer and nicer alternatives than a big piece of furniture taking up physical (and therefore eye) space. I’ve got a million pairs of shoes already so i’ve stopped buying for quite a bit now. I’m gonna use these shoes to the max of their lifespans and then off they go to the bin. Once that’s done i already know the kinds of shoes i’ll need:
- 1 cross trainer (i think black is a good colour)
- 1 leather slip on
- 1 dress shoe (current one is a black slip on so maybe when it’s gone i’ll get a black lace up
- 1 leather slipper (i’ve used this surprisingly a lot)
- 1 nonsense slipper
And some further reading has led me to question my decision to buy a sofa. Do i really need one? What will it be for? Add these to the severe lack of space in our living room and we have a problem: what furniture to get that will both serve us well and not take up a whole lot of space? And when we have our folks over we definitely need something appropriate cos our grandmothers, for example, can’t sit on the floor for too long without getting very uncomfortable.
SO our plan is to live in an empty living room for a bit to get the feels. We reckon after awhile we’ll see patterns in our behaviour starting to emerge and then can identify the gaps in the current setup. Plug the gaps and voila.
And back to the topic of LIFE, the fact is we need so little to be alive and kicking. But that’s not the message we’re sent in our everyday lives. The reasons are many, from media to the nature of capitalism to just plain human psychology but the fact is we HAVE a choice and MUST exercise some discretion and reflection in our interaction with the world (i had to, the rhyming was too good to pass up).
In today’s world we are very easily shown what we can have and what supposedly everyone
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