Have you spent time really looking round your living room? Taking in each item, the mementos from travels far and wide, books demonstrating your literary journey, DVD’s of films you love?
Recently I’ve been increasingly aware of the space we call home. This is certainly down to spending more time in the house due to being on maternity leave. Also adding a whole extra human into our terraced house has made it feel just that bit smaller! If I’m honest my knee-jerk reaction has been to say ‘we need more space, we need to move’. But what if the answer is in owning less stuff rather than having more space?
I stumbled across the modern minimalist movement earlier this year when my husband came home with a book written by the Japanese ‘tidiness expert’ Marie Kondo. Together we started to ‘Kon Marie’ our drawers and cupboards. We’ve donated, sold and thrown away and in doing so found great joy in owning less and letting what we do own breathe. Since then I’ve read books and blogs, listened to podcasts, watched documentaries and TED talks all by people who are trying to live with less. We still have lots of stuff and a way to go but we are on the journey!
This year I’m hoping to experiment with removing more of the noise from my life, to create space to think, to enjoy what I have and to consume less in the process.
So where to begin….
The first challenge I’m setting myself is this;
To not buy any new clothes for a year
Why clothes?
Well that’s simple I’m choosing this experiment because I will find it hard, I really enjoy clothes shopping but I’m pretty sure I have enough! So for this next year I will try not to buy any new clothes. There’s one caveat, if something breaks and I don’t have a replacement I can buy one, for example my belt breaks or I split my jeans! But that’s it, no browsing ebay, stocking up during the Boden sale or popping a Tesco top into my weekly shop.
Watch this space!!