Leaning Minimalist

As the days get longer, I am reminded of my weekly childhood trips to The Bangor Public Library with fondness. Picking out new books each week, and starting to read them in the car on days that seemed to last forever. Currently, I am obsessed with decluttering books. Those who know me well will find this funny because I hate clutter. I recently read, A Year of Less by Cait Flanders, The More of Less by Josh Becker and am currently working on Nobody Wants Your S**t by Messie Condo. A Year of Less was inspiring and for a minute almost made me want to go a year without purchasing anything after reading Flanders’ experience. I quickly realized this was not realistic for me regardless of how inspiring the book was. I loved The More of Less, which was very much about defining minimalism for yourself and creating that life. Nobody Wants Your S**t  is pretty much like it sounds.  A snarky, sarcastic, profane and thoroughly entertaining take on Swedish Death cleaning with a not so gentle reminder that we should all take care of our crap while we can. The book contains copious profanity so it isn’t for everyone, but it is where I found the best piece of advice:

“Nothing should take up valuable space 100 percent of the time for a .001 percent chance you’ll need it.”

So much of our lives is stored in boxes on shelves gathering dust for the .001 percent we’ll need it. The example the author uses is air mattresses.  I have an entire shelf of air mattresses, tents and sleeping bags that haven’t been used in years.  Evidently, I have been keeping them for the .001 percent chance I may want them again.  Now that I have an awareness of this fact, I am going to condense my collection. I haven’t camped in years, I would never ask an overnight guest to sleep on an air mattress and my children hate camping with every fiber of their being. This is so commonsense, I can’t believe I never thought about it before this foul mouthed author so concisely put it into words.

Part of me is drawn to minimalism and decluttering because I see how much stuff people accumulate and the time it takes to go through it before moving. Every client I see going through that pain reminds me that I do not want to put myself in that position and I come home and clean out a drawer and lighten my life a little. The other part of me is interested in decluttering because it is editing. I love reading and writing and at the core of good writing is editing.  Stephen King said, 'Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart,’ referring to the writing process and the fact that roughly half of what he writes ends up on the cutting room floor. A good piece of writing has been tweaked and edited to perfection so that only the essential remains. That’s what minimalism is to me; a perfectly edited essay and a perfectly edited home.  After I read The More of Less and thought about the author’s suggestion to come up with my own definition of minimalism I decided that to me minimalism is the ability for my home to be ‘show ready’ as if I was moving tomorrow. Most people would call that crazy, my husband included. Although, if he’s reading this, his brain hasn’t registered anything since the terrifying realization that yes, I did give away all our camping gear.  Sorry honey.