Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Living with Less


I think I'm physically incapable of keeping my room tidy for more than five minutes.Currently I can barely see the floor, and every single cupboard or desk drawer is open. I will take up the challenge to "live with less and see what you learn from the experiment."

A little while ago I watched this program with young homeless people moving into a shelter. This one guy was showing the camerman his room. The room was small, and only had a single bed and a bedside table with a lamp. "That's all you really need," I remember he said.
It was moving, how satisfied he was with having what most of us take for granted every day. It was one of the most touching things I had seen in ages, and I still remember it years later.

Something like this, but perhaps I'll add bed sheets, seeing as England is so cold!

I'm sure it was Richard Carlson who said it, though I can't find the reference, but he said that he used to live in a house that was cluttered with stuff that they kept "just in case". Then one day the family moved, but to begin with, they could only take a single bag each to their new house. After living with their bare essentials for about a month, they began to realise that they didn't need the other stuff, as they thought they did--indeed, they could barely remember what it was!

I am so happy that I'll be able to experiment with this notion. There are tons of things in my room that are taking up space but that I feel I need to keep, such as half a cupboard full of notebooks, crafty paper, and books (80% of which I'll probably never read again). Finally I can leave it all behind, knowing that I can come back to it in a few months.

Currently, my room looks a little something like this...

And my mum's facial expression is similar to mama bear's


But by tomorrow...maybe Friday at the latest... it will have only a fraction of the stuff in it. Anything I can't take with me to England, haven't used in ages, or is simply taking up space, I will throw out or donate. I'll see how many garbage bags I can fill and get back to you.

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