Starting with a side-note: I just ate after coming in from my first garage gym workout of fall 2017! It was 70 degrees out there and perfect. You know I had to document the occasion. Look for that post on Tuesday, fitness fans!
Today’s topic: an update on my minimalism journey.
Two weeks in, all I have to say is that I’m rolling in the wealth of nothingness, and I’m not even finished yet. I wish I could describe how good it feels to have as close to nothing as I’ve ever had in my adult life.
Development 1: Callaghan caught the minimalism bug just by watching me burrow through my things. I would never ask him to get rid of his things, and he loves his things, so it took me by surprise when I saw him hauling boxes of his stuff into the dining room.
He said what I’d been thinking: “I can’t believe we paid so much to have all this crap shipped from France!!”
Hence,
Development 2: The whole rest of the house is next.
When we’re done weeding out our personal belongings, we’re going to focus on everything else, starting, probably, with the kitchen.
Callaghan is even more into it than I am. I started on this journey with no intention of disturbing our decor, which we don’t have a lot of, anyway. Callaghan’s talking about donating things like the huge mirror that covers about a third of our living-room wall. It’s a simple mirror with a thick, distressed black frame. It’s beat-up and austere. I’m quite fond of it.
He’s been schooling me in minimalism with his questions.
“Do we really want that huge mirror?”
“I like it.”
“Are you sure?”
If minimalism is a game, he’s winning… but I’m all in. Maybe I don’t really want a big-ass mirror taking up all that wall-space.
Realization: I love that he found the mirror in a discard pile near his work and brought it home. I think that finds like that are the best… but minimalism means that my dumpster-diving days are over. It’s okay. Now that I’m used to the idea of a bare wall, I’m looking forward to naked walls all the way around.
Categories of things I’m not minimalizing:
- survival gear
- books (as you know)
- socks
I don’t wear most of the socks I own, but I did when we were living where it’s cold. You never know. The last thing I want to have to do is buy socks should we find ourselves living in a cold climate again. In my mind, cold-weather socks fall in the “survival gear” category.
As far as things to which I’m emotionally attached, I’m keeping just a few relics of yore. One of these is this porcelain cat I received as a gift when I was 16. This cat has been with me for over three decades. This cat has survived jaunts all over tarnation.
You’ve seen him before if you’ve been reading here for a while, but I took a selfie of us the other day. “The glass eye.”
With the porcelain cat I got in 1984.
Our dining room is empty again after hauling away the results of our first big sweep. We have house-guests coming in at the end of next week… and they’re staying for over a week… so we’ll dig in for the next big sweep somewhere in the third week of the month.
That Asian-Looking Chick 