minimalism is a word that is constantly floating through our atmosphere. We know it’s a direction we’re moving in. Living only with what we need & what brings us joy. but… learning to detach and let go of the things we’ve been carrying has been harder than we imagined.
Recently we’ve been working on tidying our house using “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” as our guide. This book has been very helpful but still, it’s a work in process. We tidied clothes, books and made it half way through papers before becoming “stuck” on this idea that we could have definitely tidied up the clothes & books better than we did the first time around. From there, we sort of halted the process and left for a month’s trip on the road to photograph our first weddings of the season.
In this time “off” from tidying our things, we’ve been given space to examine our thoughts & notions on attachment. I guess in a way, we’ve been using this time to “tidy” our heads & hearts. Our issues in letting go are rooted in fear. fear that we’ll let go of something and later regret it. fear that we’ll let go of something and later need it. Fear we’ll let go of something and then later realize it could have brought us joy. fear. fear. fear. fear.
Instead of just asking “Does it bring us joy?” We’ve started to ask “does it serve us?” & “does it make us feel alive?”
Here is the list of things will be assessing or re-assessing again once we return home. We added some of our own categories because the process of tidying is much deeper than just our things.
- the food we eat
- our exercise methods
- clothes
- books
- movies
- office supplies
- photography gear
- clients & work (saying no when it isn’t a fit)
- papers
- kitchen stuff
- blankets
- misc (junk drawers)
- furniture
- sentimentals
- the time we spend
- our house
On 16. Two years ago we attended a conference called adventure always where the idea to sell our house first presented itself. We knew we wanted to live a life of adventure and travel and the house was something that was holding us back. So we listed the house and it sold within a week. A month into the process, the bank under-appraised it and the offer fell through. Wedding season started up and we decided to not re-list it.
This month we’re re-examining the idea. We go back and forth. We love our quaint and safe neighborhood. We love being close to our good friends, central to family and close to the 290 that allows us to get anywhere in Buffalo fairly quickly. We love being close to our yoga studio, the farmer’s market and our bank. We love that our house is naturally lit most of the day & our wonderful bay window that floods the living area with light.
But the physical house, the responsibility that comes with owning and the upkeep is something that has been weighing us down. Is home ownership for us? As we started to travel more these past two years, and spend less time in our house, we’ve started to fear that we’re not taking as good of care of it as we should. Home ownership comes with the responsibility of care and if we’re not physically there, it means hiring someone else to care for it.
But then we return back from our travels, and our house is there waiting for us to take us back in and provide us with comfort and a place to rest our heads and hold our hearts. It’s a space away from the world that is just ours and it’s quiet and newly cleaned out and more spacious. To say the least, we’re excited to return home at the end of March… but home and the meaning of it, to us, is something we will constantly be exploring.
