Another almost-post

I am struggling with a new personal concept: minimalism.

My mother informed me yesterday that we had to clean our storage unit. This unit has been a surprisingly prominent in my life in the past few years. When my family moved into a smaller apartment, I was in Seattle. The new apartment had only two bedrooms, one for my mother and one for my brother. Everything that did not fit went in to the storage unit, and when I returned to this coast I went through and sorted out all my children’s toys, my children’s books, some old lava lamps, etc.

That winter we pulled out our Christmas ornaments and carefully placed them back the month after. Every summer subsequently I have dedicated a day or two to sifting through the stuff that accumulates and re-organizing. I have since widdled down my files and my art supplies and my books to half of what was originally put in there. I have had tiny apartments for the past few years, barely larger than a dorm room, and the books and portfolios that are stored in that room is the last of what I keep at my mother’s house.

I have always applied my life to the principles of “spring cleaning”. I periodically go through my files, my clothes, my STUFF and de-clutter. My clothes find a new home in a drop-off bin, my books at my old high school’s book barn, paper get trashed, etc. But the past year or so I have felt the burden of what I do still own even more as I move from small place to small place (within a calendar year I have lived in four separate places). As my goals move towards expatriatism (for a small amount of time) I am ever attracted to the backpacker’s mentality – own only what you can carry with you.
Now, that may be a bit much, as it is unnecessary when you have a place to live to reduce your life to that resembling a Beduin’s, but the aspects of multi-use and re-usable are admirable.

(Here is the post that inspired this thought: http://zenhabits.net/2009/08/the-minimalist-principle-omit-needless-things/)


The more I read about the fundamental principles of minimalism, I admire it more. The principle of “Omit needless things”, a phrase I am borrowing from the zenhabits post, who in turn borrowed it from Strunk, resonates.

Most of my beliefs, and my anxieties (about society, about life), seem to circle around this concept of the importance of making everything count, of relieving yourself of the burdens of pointlessness. Our environmental crisis