Minimalism - Living better with less stuff

Living better with less stuff…..? Is it possible?

No, it’s not possible!! 

We live in this materialistic era where we need to buy everything! 

And we need to get everything right now.

We are suggested that in order to be happy, we need to buy a bigger house, a better car, the latest electronic gadget etc etc

And lately it seems we are even more tempted!

We have imported Halloween sales, we have Black Friday….but Just 1 Friday won’t be enough ……  and we got the cyber Monday!  but, think for a second, what if we don’t need that many things to be happy? what if the happiness is not in the objects we own?

During sometime these thoughts were in my head, I knew something was broken in my approach towards buying more and more, but that click moment did not happen …. It started to happen in a very rainy day a couple of years ago, it was one of these typical autumn days, it was gray and it was pouring down.  I had to go to pick up my kids to the school, so I put on my jacket and went to the hall of my home to get an umbrella ….. and I could not find it, funny thing it is that I had 3 umbrellas! don’t ask me why? but I had 3 umbrellas!! I looked for the umbrellas around the house but no luck, no clue of the umbrellas, I kept searching in the kitchen, in the living room, kids room etc etc … nothing, no luck, no umbrella …. do you know that feeling when you need something that you know that it’s in your home but you cannot find it? It’s horrible!!! you start moving stuff around, you found things you lost or you forgot you had …. but you cannot find what you need …. so after a 10 minutes looking for the umbrella… I left home without umbrella and I arrived to the school totally wet …. 3 umbrellas at home and I was soaked to the skins …. 

That made me think, I was too focus on getting stuff, stuff that then I was not really using. Obviously something was wrong with my life. It was not the right mindset …. but I did not know how to solve it …. then one day … accidentally, not sure how, I ended up in a website about “Minimalism” and how to minimalize your life.

When I read, you might be a minimalism if

•    You think you own more than you need or

•    if you don’t find what you own or

•    even if you prefer to go to the dentist rather than going with your woman to a shopping centre … 

Then I said, hey that’s me! I want to know more about this … it’s when I discovered a way of living that changed my life and made me happier. But, what does it mean being minimalism? Minimalism is not living without anything; it’s not living in a camping tent J

Minimalism is a tool to get the exceeds of our lives to focus on what is really important. Through minimalism you can find happiness and freedom, through minimalism, you can grow as individual, you can create more and consume less.

In my case I started reading more, writing more and eventually I got interested in developing new skills, for example I decided that it might be interesting to improve my public speaking skills and that led me here to join ToastMasters. 

Minimalism is a life style that helps people question what things add value to their lives. By clearing the clutter and chaos from your life we can make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passions and contribution to name some.

There are different ways to start living in a minimalism lifestyle, in my case I started by removing the duplicates. Nowadays I do not need 2 cars, or some objects I had duplicate it, for example now I can see that having a TV in our bed room was not necessary, and I replaced watching TV in the bed  for a book before sleeping

In terms of shopping new clothes, which I was doing too often, one advice that it really helped me is,

if one gets in, one gets out,

This means, if I buy a new pair of shoes, I need to get rid of another pair of shoes. This is working quite well in my case, as sometimes when I’m walking around and I see a nice pair of shoes in a shop, then, I know that I will need to get rid of this pair of shoes, and hey, I like these shoes, they are very comfortable, so eventually I realized that I don’t really need more shoes or new clothes!!! If one gets it one gets out rule also helped to save a lot of money! Money that then I can spend having a nice dinner with some friends, that’s minimalism, it’s a tool that helped you to focus on your most important aspects of life, and usually those aspects, are not a new pair of shoes or the latest iPhone.

2015 was my year of being minimalism, and it has been a very productive year, now I feel more focus and more motivated. Now when I ask myself, living better with less is possible? I answer, yes of course!!!! and now, every rainy day I know where my umbrella is :)