flexagon | Minimalism update

Feeling tired and maybe getting-a-cold, so I thought I'd play hooky tonight... you know, skip yoga and curl up on the couch with hot chocolate and the laptop. It's always hard to know when I'm being lazy and when I'm legitimately taking care of myself, but in the context of the last week I'm okay with either. Anyway, of course one of the cats smeared poop across the floor. Cleaning it up wasn't as bad as those few minutes of looking for the poop, knowing it was somewhere and hoping I hadn't already stepped on it.

Anyway, now for a note on minimalism. One of my newer friends, I think

jupiterjuniper, asked people what was the one most influential idea of 2010 for them. Of course I said minimalism. :-) This April that's practically all I posted about.

So where does it stand now? I got rid of around half my stuff in the spring. In the summer I read a shelf-ful of all the books I hadn't read but had always meant to get around to, a project it was easy to feel great about and helped reduced the mental load of looking at the bookshelf thinking "oh yeah, that". This fall I got a new computer and recycled the old, which was a sort of scary project for me since I'd been set up on my old computer for so long. It involved a spreadsheet of what software I had, and what files were backed up, and then finally the clean sweep. A lot of digital clutter went out with that change -- though I don't know exactly what, I do feel very clean and minimal about the new computer. It helps to actually have a list of what I have on it.

Reading that, I see I haven't stopped paring down, but only slowed after the initial phase. That makes me happy.

In contrast to some, I haven't found it harder to stay in the minimal mindset than to get there. A simple "one in / one out" policy is enough to maintain my current level, and it's not hard anymore since I'm only doing one or two things at a time now. (Case study: I got my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 in the mail last week. As it was installing I offered up my old Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 on freecycle; the next morning it was gone. Not so bad, right?)

I like having less of my caring and emotion so tied up with material possessions, but I like it just as much that the stuff I do have actually reflects me and my current life. For me it's all part of the same thing, a sort of integrity in terms of what I own... but that sounds so pompous I'd rather just say "minimalism". :-)

For my next trick, I think I'm moving to a much larger space where we'll wind up with some new furniture. Not a traditionally minimalist move. It will be nice to have... not more stuff... but more space. We'll see how the rest goes; I'm hoping not to get too identified with the new things. Sometimes a table is just a table.