I began my adventure in minimalism last summer, but you know, it's a journey.
It can be overwhelming; a fair amount of drudgery interspersed by brief moments of glory (sort of like baseball). So yeah, we still had work to do this year, let me just put it that way.
One surprise for me going through the house was how much I store for activities that happen only seasonally.
Camping equipment. Lawn and garden tools. Canning and drying. Decorating.
DECORATING!
Who doesn't love to decorate? No one, apparently! Americans literally spend billions of dollars every single year on Halloween alone.
And wrapped all around Halloween is lovely autumn itself with its all its hygge-rich accoutrements like pumpkin spice, hay rides, candles, and yeah, more decorations.
So today was the day I decided to do some fall decorating.
I had already purchased about ten of the tiniest, most adorable pumpkins from a farmer in our area. I was super happy with their spare, natural beauty tucked around the house.
But hey! I realized. I have other decorations. I better go get those too!
It was with uncharacteristic tiredness that I went downstairs and drug my fall decoration box upstairs. The usual happiness I feel in this activity was strangely missing. Do I want to do this? I was wondering. There's an awful lot of things I'd rather be doing. Then, Yes, yes! We loves this, precious!! We loves to decorate in the fall with lots of plastic pumpkinzes and leaves and vinyl clings. Yes, yes, precious, keep walking, keep walking!
I opened the box and started going through all the things. And I kept waiting, waiting for the thrill, the happiness, the sense of joy or a sense of something, anything.
And yeah, I sensed something alright, but it wasn't happiness.
Going through the box, I saw the one decoration I've had for twenty years that I truly love. Then there are the homemade placemats and place cards the kids made years ago along with some vintage Halloween candles my husband brought into the marriage (I still don't know the story behind these, but it's cute we have them. Odd, but cute).
Those few things touched me, and I was glad to have them. But there was so much more than that in the box. So much more. And it's all stuff I've purchased in the last ten years, and isn't connected to anything meaningful in any way, shape or form. It's actually junk. It's new, beautiful junk, but it's junk. JUNK!
It's crazy to even say that and recognize this (I am having another layer of revelation right now... is that the newest definition of junk: it's meaningless to you but could still have monetary value??)
This is what was confirmed once again in yet another situation that involves stuff: I've been buying things to be distracted from my real emotions and my actual life.
I didn't realize the trap I'd fallen into until the past year. I seriously thought if you didn't have a lot of money, you couldn't get caught in the web of consumerism. I truly believed this.
I shop local! I buy my clothes at thrift stores! I don't have an Amazon account! I've been proud of my more humble shopping habits, never realizing underneath it all, its still a life of buying, a focus on consumption.
Staring down into the box, I felt exhausted just looking at everything. It would take me less than five minutes to decorate with the few items I really cherished, but I had a BOX of things to figure out what to do with.
Then, what happened next?
Things actually went from bad to worse!
I picked up one of the decently cute, newish decorations, a wire and wood blackbird with a Halloween hat on. I promptly dropped it and broke it's tiny little head. Not clean off (sadly), so that meant I had to fix it.
I found the glue to fix it. I found the glue, fixed it, fussed with it, waited for it to dry, rearranged it, done.
As I was gluing its little head back on, I figured between the time I spent deciding to buy it and buying it, getting it home safely, unpacking it, displaying it last year, repacking it, now unpacking it, dropping it, fixing it, rearranging it, I've spent about two hours on this tiny wooden object that I forgot I even had until five minutes ago.
When I multiply that in my head for all the optional objects I own, I feel sickened. Our lives, my life, is literally going to things. And I don't actually have much, by Western standards.
With what is now a familiar routine, I grabbed a grocery bag, snapped it open and start filling it up for the thrift store. I set aside a few items I knew I could sell easily online. I stared down and looked at a box that's about two-thirds empty.
This isn't the first time that's happened.
As I pack a much lighter box back downstairs, I realized I didn't decorate at all for Easter this year. I have a feeling when I open that box in six months, I'll be doing the same thing. Pretty soon, I'll have one "seasonal" box and a few for Christmas.
Light and free, quality over quantity.
I'm digging my new life.