Lessons Minimalism Has Taught Me
Taking Back Time and Experience
Minimalism isn’t for everyone. But don’t wait until feeling ready. There’s no such thing as feeling ready.
Any straws you grasp onto are just straws.
By releasing 90% of space and belongings, citizenship in the broader world increases by 90%. The less we own, the richer we become. The less we cling, the more we grow.
Sometimes the choice is to let go of possessions or let our souls die working jobs we hate merely to try to make enough money for more space than we actually need for nothing more than to house all the possessions we don’t need. Time and experience are the true precious commodities, which everyone realizes by the end. If possessions and space are eating up all of one’s time and preventing the joy of life, then the right choice is likely to give up some, most, or all, of the possessions and space.
We can look for different, higher-paying jobs to purchase larger space and more possessions – but upon enough reflection, it may prove that we’re already doing what we’re best at and what we will be happiest doing. Even if we remain materially poorer, we may find ourselves and also our families experientially and emotionally richer.
For some, minimalism is an epiphany of eastern spirituality. For others, it’s a non-choice, a result of tumultuous losses, a forced step to preserve the best of what is left of life. In other words, the possessions don’t all release in some mystical puff of eastern spirituality and New Age joy. It may be agony and freeing at the same time.
Choice or not at the start, how one reacts is negotiable, along with what one does with the freed-up time and experience.
We all travel at times on long tracks of inaction or mistake-making. The moment to let go comes at a different juncture for everyone. Don’t self-blame for not arriving at the decision sooner; don’t regret years wasted – they weren’t wasted. We can only take action when things get clear, however long that takes.
The moment things get clear is not the same thing as feeling ready. The time of feeling ready never comes. Letting go is hard at first anyway, and the culture bears too many messages saying not to do it, that we can only be happy purchasing infinite possessions, that we need the latest and best possession, that we must constantly try to escape the present moment to some future moment that will be “better.” Extraordinary power and many billions of dollars go into this, and it is very, very convincing. But all of that is not more powerful than a single soul. Anyone can opt out of the seduction and let the gaslighting go on without them, reclaiming the present moment; reclaiming time and experience.
Life leads to minimalism anyway as the final whistle stop. The sooner the arrival at this truth, the sooner the rendezvous with acceptance and peace.
Goodbye little ship in dusty frame
Economy
What is needed is radically less than the loads people bear. For some of us, the years spent pursuing the American Dream were years full of lies and dead ends, a kind of scam. Letting go of possessions and space, even in the face of towering loss and parallel tracks of grief, finally gives way to peace.
Some of us have stalled out on the far stretched-out ends of a budget and a breakdown, living paycheck to paycheck. Relinquishing possessions and space relieves this suffering, makes it possible to create a plentiful buffer of savings, and even still be able to afford small expenses that contribute to real happiness – all the more appreciated because of not being enslaved to worry at all times.
The resulting calm and tranquil mind leads to better mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health.
Confidence also arrives with cutting back; knowing how to do it leads to certainty that expenses and lifestyle could be cut back even further if required or desired.
Many strive for large amounts of space and possessions for the sake of their children, which is admirable motivation; however, possessions do not make children happy any more than possessions make adults happy. Children are happiest when experientially and emotionally rich just as adults are happiest when experientially and emotionally rich.
While it might have felt at first like we were giving up something, progress on life goals accelerates, and the progress becomes easier, not harder. With life simplified, clarity increases around deep-seated values.
Not only is time freed by working less, but by letting go of the possessions, we free up the time we used to spend moving the possessions around, trying to polish and clean and maintain the possessions; and we free up the emotional energy we used to go waste by constantly fretting over the fact that we didn’t have adequate time to properly move, polish, clean, and maintain the great number of possessions.
Goodbye dusty childhood jewelry box
Possessions
Minimalism looks different for everyone. Deciding what to keep is a very individual choice. Even if it’s large, if it’s something you use and love, keep it. Some decisions on what to keep are best made by logic; others by the heart; others by the gut.
Some small precious keepsakes should also be kept. Deciding which ones is difficult. If it is an item that also has any utility (for example, a box), this helps. Size is also a factor (tiny is easier to justify, medium-size harder), along with whether the item brings happiness or insightful contemplation of personal values.
If it brings bad memories or inner criticisms, let it go.
When hesitating on items, take photos of them before you send them away. Or don’t. When you see the photos later on your phone, you may shrink away. But one day you can also delete the photos.
Some may want to sell their possessions, and this can be the right choice. However, others will want to let go largely and all at once to charities, so that the possessions are not sitting around staring them in the face while they contemplate asking prices.
Yes, at first there is sharp pain and grief with every carload of possessions released. But there is also a freeing catharsis. Now you can go anywhere and be anything.
Later there will be random stabs of grief or guilt over just a few particular released possessions. However, the stab is temporary and fleeting while the time to do what you love is ongoing and permanent.
Later it will prove that it was in fact a mistake to let go of a few of the possessions. This is inevitable. However, there is a degree of acceptable collateral damage that is justified for the rewards gained. For the few releases that were a mistake, there were hundreds more that were right.
Much more frequently, you will find yourself with no regrets.
Goodbye kitchen witch. Thank you for the luck in making tasty dishes.
The Ancestors
Some of us may look back wondering why we didn’t do this sooner – it might even seem embarrassing because the answer was so simple. But this is unfair. For many, there is some generational distance necessary – a gap of death – since parents, grandparents, great-parents (the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers) so fully set a certain example by embodying and embracing the American Dream (that is, voluminous space and possessions); it is still hard for some of us to come to terms with the Dream being far more difficult to attain now, the economic realities (and many other realities of our present world) being utterly different than the Ancestors’ circumstances.
Don’t hold on to possessions thinking it is somehow for the Ancestors’ sake, whether land, house, general possessions, or even heirlooms. If clinging to any of these is undermining your joy and fulfillment, the Ancestors would not want this for you. They have gone on to something else. Honoring the Ancestors does not require clinging to any of their space or possessions; honoring the Ancestors is living our own lives to the fullest. The Ancestors didn’t make their noble sacrifices to deliver us here only to be unhappy and unfulfilled.
There will be times that you believe you were temporarily mad to have let go of some particular possession. In some cases, this will have been a practical thing, and you can purchase or borrow another; in other cases, it will have been because of a connection to some person, usually an Ancestor. Remind yourself that you are now living your best life to honor them.
Goodbye graduation hood
If You Have Already Been Unfairly Forced to Let Go of Too Much
If you have had a great deal of grief and loss: You may be afraid to let go of many little possessions because you feel they are all you have left. But letting go even more deeply may help you in honoring the one you lost by freeing yourself to move on. The heart always remembers; the heart does not depend on one of the lost one’s possessions, let alone many of their possessions. Keeping around one or two of the loved one’s precious belongings is usually enough for gentle contemplation and honoring.
Some of us built up possessions in connection with nesting: the notion that we would have progeny. For those of us who then ended up childless, once that acceptance sets in, so too can the acceptance that there is no need for the space or possessions – that the greatest gift to oneself would be letting go. Making room for greater love and care of self is wise since there will not be others.
Nevertheless, parents, too, can embrace minimalism; having too many possessions can later be a burden on a child – we have all had parents, grandparents, great aunts or uncles, who passed away and left behind mountains of possessions with very little instruction of what to do with any of it.
If you are beyond the middle stage of life, if the truth for you so far has been a sunken cost fallacy - an investment in many possessions associated with a life that didn’t happen - stop holding on against all logic. Holding on is also what is keeping the pain fixed in place. Though grieving sometimes in the hugeness of it and the ongoing need for forgiveness of it all, on the other side there’s a soft and open-ended joy and peace.
Goodbye music box that played “The Long and Winding Road.” Thank you for the bittersweetness.
