Unburdening
A year and a half ago, we finished a guest house here on the ranch so we could provide a comfortable place for family, friends, and the occasional paid guest to stay. It is a cute, compact one-bedroom house with all the basics, but not much room for anything beyond. I have thought that if I were going to try to live in that house, I would have to build on more storage space. But then I go over to check on things or clean, and it is such a pleasant little space that I think maybe I would like to just go over there and hang out sometimes.
I have been thinking about what makes that guest house space so appealing to me, and I have concluded that it is the lack of stuff. Over there, the most chaotic situation takes me maybe an hour to set right. There just is not enough stuff nor space to get too terribly disarrayed. After that thought, my mind turns to my own house where there is lots of stuff. I love my house, but the sheer volume of stuff contained in it means that I could spend every minute of every day trying to keep chaos at bay. There is not much chance I would ever become a true minimalist, although I love the serenity of minimalist spaces. But I also love the cozy and homey feel of the more cluttered “cottage” type of spaces. The inside of my head is not serene and uncluttered, so how would my surroundings be that way? For one thing, I am a maker and doer, which requires tools and materials. That one aspect of who I am is enough to guarantee I will never be a minimalist. Where is the balance between those two spaces and their accompanying states of mind? There has been a trend for the past several years for people to not set New Year’s resolutions, but instead to set intentions, sometimes represented by a single word. I am jumping the gun by a couple of months with a word that popped into my head as I thought about all this—unburdened. I realized that I feel very burdened and tied down by the volume of stuff that I have here and the amount of work and responsibility that goes with it, so I have started to lighten my load.
I have been taking advantage of inflection points in my quest for unburdening. One had been the renovation of a bathroom. As the work nears completion, I am looking at all of the stuff I cleared out and thinking hard about what I want to put back in. I am amazed/dismayed by what I am finding—a tiny bit of contact lens solution last used by a person who has not lived here in nine years, for example. Things are being thrown away, donated, put back in their proper place, or repurposed. Less than a quarter of what was taken out is going back in. If I can keep my focus and energy levels up, I would like to go through the same exercise with every room in this house. The next inflection point is the change in weather (finally) and the seasonal wardrobe changeover, as my closets are too small to hold a year-round wardrobe. I should go get to work now while I am feeling ruthless!