I want LESS, and the older I get the more “less” I want.
As I pondered what my year would look like on New Year’s Eve 2023, I chose four words that would shape the coming months, words I could return to if I was feeling lost or unsure. These guideposts would serve as a backdrop for my endeavors, I’d found in years past, and would help meaningfully shape the trajectory of my life. The words I chose for this year were:
ROOTS, INTUTION, PERSIST, and LESS.
Full of vigor and gumption, I was eager to get started. Almost as soon as I wrote them down I wanted to begin; I want to live these words, and I want to do it now! Well INTUITION can’t be coaxed, it can only be relied upon in moments of true need, and to PERSIST one would need to first have begun something. ROOTS, arguably my loftiest aspiration, above all takes time. But LESS? Well I can have LESS right now. I can start having LESS this very instant, and I can have as much LESS as I am brave enough to attempt.
Even though I am bringing it to the center of my life this year, the concept of LESS is not new to me. My first experiences with less take me back to my final year in University. By late 2015 I was a Senior at Colorado State University, trying to wrap my head around what was next. School had been emotionally daunting, graduation never a sure end; my scenic path to a Bachelor’s degree included three changes to my college Major and two to my Minor, two serious health crises, one semester where I received a 0.8 GPA leading to one withdrawal where I was sure I was done, and a re-admission before I finally got on a path I could see through to the end.
Though I had persevered and was on track to graduate, with all my imagination I couldn’t dream up a career path that would feel easier or more sustainable for me than school had been. Put simply, I was having a hard time seeing myself as “part of the world,” post-grad.
My first thought was to stay put. I loved living in Fort Collins, and for all my struggles in school, I had finally managed to make some lasting friendships and connections. I even had a lead on seasonal work in the summers if I could find something else to do through the school year. My brother, who I lived with, was also planning on staying, so I thought I had it all worked out; that is until a notice from our Property Manager rather suddenly advised us that we would not have the option to renew our lease due to the owner wanting to have a relative move in the following year.
I did something I now regard as a habit, something I can now see as a pattern of action across my life, for better or worse; I was so scorned by the inability to see my plans through that I resolved to burn them to the ground and choose something else entirely. (Coincidentally, it was this same scorched-earth mentality that sent me to Fort Collins in the first place after I was waitlisted but later admitted to my first choice school in Boulder). Moving to a new house in Fort Collins wasn’t what I had planned, so I decided I needed to do the furthest thing I could think of. Instead of staying put, I decided to buy and renovate a camper, and become a nomad.
That same year, a full-length documentary came out on Netflix called Minimalism. The Minimalists, two white guys in their thirties (?) who ran a blog on the subject, told stories about how they had each come to the concept of minimalism, how they had wrestled with it, and the changes they’d each seen in their lives for the better since making the shift. I needed to downsize dramatically to fit my entire life into a 15-foot travel trailer, and Minimalism held the key. I didn’t know at the time that my life would lead me to Missoula, Montana, the same town in which The Minimalists live, or that Minimalism would become a core tenant of my personality, and my life, forever after.
Inspired by the movie, and the move, I successfully cut my belongings in half at least, parting with my prized collections of hats, shoes, video game consoles, and musical instruments, and downsizing my collection of board games (but keeping my collections of Pokémon cards, completed journals, and books). I used the storage available in my camper as a guide—my wardrobe could be exactly as large as the closet in the camper, my other belongings would need to fit inside the cabinets, and so on. Unable to part with my lifelong dream of having a small library in my future home (complete with sliding ladder), I permitted myself to keep four small boxes of books in the garage at my mom’s house—everything else was gifted, donated, sold, or thrown away.
In many ways I have been on a journey of Minimalism ever since. I noticed that moving into more permanent places usually coincided with a swelling of my belongings, and another cull would take place when I moved back into my camper. I’d downsize before moves to another state, and then begin collecting anew once I’d landed. I love to thrift, tantalized by the thrill of the treasure-hunt, and would sometimes be prone to collecting knick-knacks, excess furniture, aspirational items in my wardrobe, and the occasional truly bizarre item I insisted must be displayed in full view.
Over the years I remained intrigued by Minimalism, and was absolutely rapt when Marie Kondo’s Netflix show Tidying Up made it’s debut in 2019. When I say that I sat at full attention for each episode, dutifully pausing and taking notes each time a card would come on screen with instructions, I am exaggerating not one hint. To this day I still fold my shirts and pants according to the Konmari method, and I am better for it thank you very much! It might be just slightly too much to admit that a photo of Marie Kondo folding a shirt even made it onto my vision board in 2021.
Yet even as I have spent the better part of the last decade engaged with ideas about owning LESS, I can look around my home now and see that by some fashion it has been let slip. I still own considerably few possessions compared to most of the people I know, but I have a knowing in my body that my number of belongings is out of sync with the size of my space, and the size of life I want. After all this time, I have developed a somatic sense for being in a space which has the exact right number of items in it, and I am off the mark just a bit.
For starters, my house has a quaint backyard and large shed, or a small garage, depending on who you ask. The label “garage” does a tiny bit for the marketability of the outbuilding, but the truth is that the overhead beams (if they can be called that) stand at just over 5’11” and I would take the building down in one-fell-swoop if I ever tried to park my SUV inside of it. So what do I use it for? For storage, of course.
The issue is, strictly speaking, I don’t believe in storage.
I don’t even really believe in covered storage in the house, like keeping things in cupboards and drawers. My perspective comes from a combination of Minimalism (why do you own it if you access it so infrequently as to store it out of sight?) and ADHD tendencies (purchasing of multiples of items because they disappear from my brain when I can’t see them). I think of these spaces as chiefly as a tool we use to keep the things we own out of sight, and therefore out of mind. While I do use my cupboards and drawers out of necessity, I have one single, open-faced closet in my home, and precious little other corners to tuck things away into. My philosophy is this: I want to be comfortable enough with everything I own that it can be visible in my home without being a source of discontent.
And maybe that’s the heart of it—the vast majority of things I own are on shelves, visible to the naked eye, easily counted, sorted, or rearranged. In this way, it becomes quite clear to me when there are too many of them. So, as I have many times before, I am once again committing myself to downsizing. Even as I know it’ll continue to be a journey more than a task I can check off a to-do list, I feel my home will need a firm Spring-style-cleaning in order for me to settle into it more readily. And putting down my ROOTS here is what I am really after.
I’ve gotten rid of so many things in the last eight years, cultivated a strong sense for what sparks joy, read and watched many interesting pieces of media on the subject of Minimalism, and made significant changes to the way I move through the world. My reason for pointing this out is that even the most seasoned among us could occasionally stand a refresher of the basics. Hopefully my foray back into this journey can serve as a catalyst for you too, whether you’re starting out, or a vet stretching those muscles, ready to get back on the field.
Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be using some guidelines from the back of the book I just finished, The Year of Less by Cait Flanders. I’ll be making some lists and doing an inventory.
I’ll be sitting mightily with each of my belongings to help determine if it is something true about me, here, now.
I will be ready to part with anything that is not.
In this way I aim to not only set myself up for success with the shopping ban, but get tangibly back in contact with the things in life I value most (and spoiler alert: they aren’t “things” after all).
Blog cover photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash