Starting Minimalism
So why embrace Minimalism? When you've quit your job, ended your career and decided to take a break from working for money in order to focus on family you actually become lost because all your life, all you have known is go to school, get a good paying job and retire 40 years later.
Here I am, less than halfway through my “working” life, at home every day just going through the motions of raising a family, at the point where I encountered the idea of minimalism I had a two year old and a baby of 5 months. The house was always in a mess, toys everywhere, laundry basket always brimming full no matter how many loads of washing was done each day, 24 hours was just never enough!
I was stuck, I was lost, I was even more stressed than when I was working 14 hours a day, 6 days a week! And it showed, my health was deteriorating and I was losing so much weight my 32 inch waist trousers kept sliding off. How could this be, I made the decision not to work at the job I hated therefore I had an extra 14 hours each day, the maths seemed simple enough?
Though here was the problem, I did everything and everything I thought I needed to and more, cooking and cleaning, laundry and gardening, grocery shopping and running errands, trying to make sound investments whilst saving more (remember I no longer had a stable income), playing with and teaching my children and then there was reading and learning for myself, the only thing I did not do was the breastfeeding!
Time was sparse, mind was cluttered, the house was untidy and so many things needed to be done, my mind and everything around me just needed to calm down,minimalism appealed to my nature.
I have always been a tidy and organised person, this was of course before having children, items were automatically arranged alphabetically or categorically and though I had many material possessions such as clothes, phones, computers, watches and books I only had on show or within easy reach the things I used the most, the rest were packed away tidily into draws and cupboards, under beds and out of sight. Now with a family and children, time was at a premium and space too.
Minimalism was the perfect answer for me and my nature, it was something I could do and it fitted in with my lost character, less could be more. Firstly I focused on the decluttering and the organising because that is how most minimalists start out and it was the perfect starting point less physical clutter meant more space around me and within my mind also the bonus would be less tidying and cleaning in the future, possibly. By this point writing, I have packed up all the clothes I have not worn or intend to wear into bags, if I don’t wear them in the next 30 days I will donate them. Every draw, every cupboard, every shelf was emptied out and reorganised minus the items that were not used and not needed (why would you need 6 sets of bedsheets and duvet covers, and 2 of them were identical!), we gained so much more space although my wife has yet to discard of any items of clothing and my daughter will not dispense with her toys…these are challenges for another day, we are at the very start remember.
Now the story has just begun, I need to think on a deeper level as to how my life has been controlled so abusively by possessions and stuff to the point where I had lost space, lost control and lost my mind, I truly feel that I am on the way to regaining a tiny piece of life back. To be fair there are still so many things in and around the house that are not required but I have held back throwing them out because I feel I still need them “just in case” or “I need this”.
Minimalism for me at the early stage is a deliberate act to regain my life that I feel I have lost to society and it’s consumerism, I want to simply in order to clarify and because I have been able to afford myself this enviable existence of not having to work and be able to raise my young children first-hand, I want to embrace this moment at focus on what really matters. Minimalism can be my way eliminating all the ‘noise’ and focusing on finding real value and meaning from each day without losing myself to following what society requires of me.
A shoutout and a thank you to The Minimalists at theminimalists.com without their guidance I think I would be lost on this journey!
