13 fevereiro 2023
I’m late to something, again. I’m bad at planning and can get lost even with a GPS guided map in my hand.
I finally find the cafe, down a tiny winding street, at last aided by the helpful logo outside. It looks like this is the writer’s group, six people all writing away on their laptops at one table. But since the group starts with quiet writing time, I plop down near them and hope I am right.
What possessed me to join a writing group! I write a blog, nothing “serious”. Not fiction, journalism, memoir, or anything with a heftiness to it. A reader or two has said that they like my writing style. Awkward jokes and talking about what I’ve done to declutter and move across the ocean, trying to connect. Hoping that my writing might help someone, touch someone, brighten someone’s day.
The topic is serious though. Minimalism and decluttering has been in the spotlight recently, but I’ve been reading about similar topics since the mid-90s, if not before. Your Money or Your Life was mostly about money, but talked about valuing your life energy by minimizing spending, which … tada! often leads to fewer things.
I didn’t follow the YMOYL program strictly but did keep most of its principles in mind.
A tune from one of my favorite movies comes over the cafe’s speakers. The movie ends with the female protagonist talking about love and she ends with “…I just might deserve [it].”
The unfortunate part is that I have trouble believing I deserve things. Most of the time I barely knew what I wanted. It turned out my job in life was allowing myself to want things, and even gasp try things out and realize I didn’t like them, without feeling like I’d wasted money in doing so.
I can’t credit simplicity with this entirely. My wife has suggested that I should try to figure out what I want and go for it for years, and has modeled that herself. Therapy and community has helped also.
But I do think that removing the excess stuff was a factor. There was stuff that was holding me back in the past. Clearing the untidy spaces allowed a sense of calm to emerge.
Even here, it is a continuing task. I have a penchant for saving and re-using containers that maybe don’t need to be saved – definitely not in such quantities. That didn’t automatically go away!
Like so many worthwhile things in life, simplicity is a process, and it is different for everyone. Let me know if you have found anything particularly helpful for you or your family.
If you like my blog posts, will you point someone else to the blog? I would really appreciate it. And for my commenters, thank you for responses and suggestions!
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