So I was just about to write a nice little post last week
about our car downsizing experiment, and how we decided to keep two cars, and
all the reasons why – where we live (rural, mountainous, with no solid public
transportation, far away from THE grocery store) and how we live (running a
business, with two small children), etc. We were sorting out what kind of car
to buy to replace my little putt-putt. Then we drove back to the Hudson Valley
to visit family. And, lo and behold, our other
car died, on the day we were supposed to drive home.
It’s been six weeks now. Two (old) cars down, one (new-ish) car
up. The one-car experiment continues.
What’s been on my mind lately, though, is more about why we
downsize, rather than how or how much.
Because I see (especially in the tiny house movement and the
minimalist movement) a push towards decluttering as some strange anti-American
Dream competition, where numbering one’s possessions and obsessive downsizing
have overpowered the whole purpose behind the origins of the movement. The
place that Things once held is now just replaced by the-getting-rid-of-Things.
I work with data, numbers, and statistics on a Monday
through Friday basis in my job in data governance. I see how taking a count – a
real, numeric, quantitative count – of one’s belongings could be helpful, to
set before you everything you have as one lump sum total. It could force you to
see each thing individually as you give it a cardinal number. I haven’t done it
yet, so I’m only surmising.
What I don’t understand or see value in is the competition
(with oneself or with others) to get that number down. Is there a perfect
number of Things that we’re all trying to obtain? (If there is, can someone
please share?!) If I have 83 possessions, am I happier than my
friend who was 87? Or if I have 207 possessions now, am I any better off than I
was when I had 208?
And I can attest to the fact that decluttering feels GOOD.
Really good. It literally lightens your burdens in life to get rid of things
you don’t need. But I see folks for whom decluttering is their new hoarding. It
fills their void. It becomes just another addiction to distract from what
really is important.
But what IS important? What does freedom from Things mean?
I’m in the middle of reading Everything That Remains by The Minimalists Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. (P.S. I think this is a great read,
no matter where on the minimalist continuum you are.) Millburn writes,
“Ultimately, the purpose of embracing minimalism has to do with the benefits we
each experience once we’re on the other side of decluttering. Hence, removing
the clutter is not the end result; it is merely the first step…. It is possible
to get rid of everything you own and still be utterly miserable.”
And: “When I got rid of the majority of my possessions, I
was forced to confront my darker side, compelled to ask questions I wasn’t
prepared for: When did I give so much meaning to material possessions? What is
truly important in life? … Who is the person I want to become? How will I
define my own success?”
These are the tougher questions that everyone on a
downsizing journey runs into eventually and has to answer. For themselves.
I’ll tell you one of my answers.
This week, I’m writing from a beautiful big house in coastal
Maine. We rented it on airbnb.com on a last-minute whim, sharing a vacation
week with my in-laws. Because I work remotely, I can work from anywhere, so I
figured why not work from coastal Maine?*
We also thought, why leave an empty house behind? So we took
the leap, ran around and made some last-minute fixes, and rented out our home
on airbnb. (My fingers are crossed for a good first review!)
This is one of our goals, something that has value in our
lives: to be mobile, unattached to mortgage/responsibility/Things, ready and
able to travel and see the world around us. It’s not like we don’t want roots.
It’s more like we want to be like seaweed, with strong roots in the ocean floor
below us but the ability to wander around with the waves. Because we chose a
small mortgage and we live in an area where people vacation frequently, we can
rent our house for a few days, cover our mortgage, and travel somewhere new
without going into debt for the experience.
This is what having fewer things, and small house living, is
giving me.
For now.
Life is fluid, right? It’s good to check back in now and
again because what I’m doing right now might not work for me, for my family, in
five years. Or two years. Or whenever. I try to stay sensitive to the shifts in
our lives and revisit what we want and how to get there as necessary.
If you’re on a path of downsizing or sorting out what things
you want to own that add value to your life, keep the end goal in mind: to add value, as you define it.
Even if you define it from a porch swing on a summer night in Maine.
*Though, through a series of poor circumstances, I ended up taking the week off. My husband had a (thankfully) brief hospital visit at the beginning of the week and we weren’t even sure we’d be able to make the trip. But it was his birthday, and he wanted to be by the coast (isn’t the ocean relaxing?) and I wanted him to be happy, and he said he felt up to it, so we cautiously set off from our home 6 (or was it 10?) hours away. Basically, I looked for every hospital in between there and here just in case something went wrong. Seriously, I don’t make this stuff up. Anyone with or married to someone with Crohn’s Disease probably understands. There’s some type of balance we have to strike between being safe (like, at home in a comfortable place, or near a hospital) and living life (like, going on this trip!).
