Living better with less stuff…..? Is it possible?
No, it’s
not possible!!
We live in
this materialistic era where we need to buy everything!
And we need
to get everything right now.
We are
suggested that in order to be happy, we need to buy a bigger house, a better
car, the latest electronic gadget etc etc
And lately
it seems we are even more tempted!
We have
imported Halloween sales, we have Black Friday….but Just
1 Friday won’t be enough … … and we got the cyber Monday! but, think for a second,
what if we don’t need that many things to be happy? what if the happiness is
not in the objects we own?
During
sometime these thoughts were in my head, I knew something was broken in my approach
towards buying more and more, but that click moment did not happen …. It
started to happen in a very rainy day a couple of years ago, it was one of these
typical autumn days, it was gray and it was pouring down. I had to go to pick up my kids to the school,
so I put on my jacket and went to the hall of my home to get an umbrella …..
and I could not find it, funny thing it is that I had 3 umbrellas! don’t ask
me why? but I had 3 umbrellas!! I looked for the umbrellas around the house but
no luck, no clue of the umbrellas, I kept searching in the kitchen, in the
living room, kids room etc etc … nothing, no luck, no umbrella …. do you know
that feeling when you need something that you know that it’s in your home but
you cannot find it? It’s horrible!!! you start moving stuff around, you found
things you lost or you forgot you had …. but you cannot find what you need ….
so after a 10 minutes looking for the umbrella… I left home without umbrella
and I arrived to the school totally wet …. 3 umbrellas at home and I was soaked
to the skins ….
That made
me think, I was too focus on getting stuff, stuff that then I was not really
using. Obviously
something was wrong with my life. It was not the right mindset …. but I did not
know how to solve it …. then one day … accidentally, not sure how, I ended up
in a website about “Minimalism” and how to minimalize your life.
When I
read, you might be a minimalism if
• You think you own more than you need or
• if you don’t find what you own or
• even if you prefer to go to the dentist
rather than going with your woman to a shopping centre …
Then I
said, hey that’s me! I want to know more about this … it’s when I discovered a
way of living that changed my life and made me happier. But, what does it mean
being minimalism? Minimalism is not living without anything; it’s not living in
a camping tent J
Minimalism
is a tool to get the exceeds of our lives to focus on what is really
important. Through minimalism you can find happiness and
freedom, through minimalism, you can grow as individual, you can
create more and consume less.
In my case
I started reading more, writing more and eventually I got interested
in developing new skills, for example I decided that it might be
interesting to improve my public speaking skills and that led me here to join
ToastMasters.
Minimalism
is a life style that helps people question what things add value to their
lives. By clearing the clutter and chaos from your life we can make room for
the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passions and
contribution to name some.
There are
different ways to start living in a minimalism lifestyle, in my case I started
by removing the duplicates. Nowadays I do not need 2 cars, or some objects I
had duplicate it, for example now I can see that having a TV in our bed room
was not necessary, and I replaced watching TV in the bed for a book before sleeping
In terms of
shopping new clothes, which I was doing too often, one advice that it really
helped me is,
if
one gets in, one gets out,
This means,
if I buy a new pair of shoes, I need to get rid of another pair of shoes. This
is working quite well in my case, as sometimes when I’m walking around and I
see a nice pair of shoes in a shop, then, I know that I will need to
get rid of this pair of shoes, and hey, I like
these shoes, they are very comfortable, so eventually I realized that
I don’t really need more shoes or new clothes!!! If one gets it one gets out
rule also helped to save a lot of money! Money that then I can spend having a
nice dinner with some friends, that’s minimalism, it’s a tool that
helped you to focus on your most important aspects of life, and usually those
aspects, are not a new pair of shoes or the latest iPhone.
2015 was my
year of being minimalism, and it has been a very productive year, now
I feel more focus and more motivated. Now when I ask myself, living better
with less is possible? I answer, yes of course!!!! and now, every rainy day I
know where my umbrella is :)