Stumbling Towards Minimalism

I've always been a collector of things. Cool things, memorable things, useful things. I prided myself on being the person who could produce on demand whatever random craft item, costume element, or useful bauble the situation required.

But my house was always a mess. Always. I thought it was just me. A sign of a creative mind. Of someone who wasn't bothered by external appearances.

But it did bother me. I didn't want it to, but it did. And nothing I tried worked. No cleaning system could keep me focused for more than a few days. And I felt constantly disappointed in myself.

About nine months ago, I was complaining about my inability to keep my house clean, and someone said something to me that changed my life. He said, "Maybe you just need less stuff. You know how diabetics can't have too much sugar? Maybe you're like that with stuff."

The person who said this to me wasn't a minimalist, but he started me on the path to minimalism. Why had I never put those two things together before? The fact that I collect things isn't unrelated to the fact that I can't keep my house clean. In fact, it could be the VERY REASON I can't keep my house clean.

The only problem now was that I had absolutely no idea where to begin. Maybe Marie Kondo? She's a minimalist, right? I went into my Overdrive account and downloaded the audio book for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. While I was there, I searched for other books about minimalism, and I downloaded a second book for good measure, a book called Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki.

I started listening to Marie Kondo's book first. She had a lot of things to say that I really liked. But something about her method didn't feel right for my situation. It felt like it was, ultimately, just another cleaning/organizing system that I wouldn't be able to keep up with. Don't get me wrong - I love Marie Kondo, and I have adopted many of her strategies. But I couldn't get 100% on board with her method, and I couldn't figure out why. I didn't figure it out until the chapter about handbags. She has a system for storing handbags of similar size inside each other so they take up less space and hold their shape better. A system for storing handbags. That's when it clicked for me. It wasn't that the KonMari method was too extreme for me. It's that it wasn't extreme enough. The solution I wanted from minimalism wasn't "how to store your handbags." I was looking for something more like "how to get by with only one handbag."

So I started listening to Fumio Sasaki's book. HERE was the minimalism I was looking for. The simple "less stuff, more joy" minimalism I wanted for myself. I especially loved that he explored the underlying philosophy. Why stuff isn't making us happy. Why minimalism makes sense. Why keeping extra stuff lying around is costing you money in the long run. And the principle of "less stuff = less to clean" really came into focus. I called my kids into the kitchen to do a little experiment. I set up three trays: One with just one thing to clean around, one with a few, organized things to clean around, and one with our normal life's clutter to clean around. The moral of the story, which should be obvious, but is still important to realize: It's a lot easier to clean around less stuff. (I posted the video of our cleaning experiment on YouTube here: Our Minimalism Cleaning Experiment.)

Lesson one: Less stuff = Less stuff to clean.

This is the first post in a series of posts about my journey to minimalism. You can read the second post here: The "See You Later" Porch