Thursday, March 9, 2017

Less Stuff = A Better Life?

In all reality, I have a pretty decent life.  No one is terminally ill.  We all have good health.  We have a roof over our heads, access to plenty of treats, and enough money to get by each month (barely, but still)  we all have oodles of shoes and toys, and clothes, and craft supplies, and blankets, and pillows, and more toys, and more clothes, and paper, and pens, and broken crayons.  Well you get the idea.  We have a lot of stuff.  I'm kind of like Ariel, from The Little Mermaid..."I've got gadgets and gizmos of plenty, I've got who's it's and what's it's galore."  And I think in the past that is what has given me knowledge that we're doing ok.  Look at all the stuff we've accumulated.  We are succeeding.  We've got the stuff to prove it. 

I no longer feel that way.  Now I feel buried and enslaved by our stuff.  I've been reading every piece of content that Allie Casazza has been putting out about minimalism and every thing she says, I raise my hand high in the air and say. "Yep!  That's me!"  And I'm so ready to be done with all the organizing, and re-organizing, and cleaning all just to wake up the next day and do it all over again.  Not to mention, all the time I could be spending with my kids actually having fun instead of cleaning non-stop.

I'm literally so freaking sick of it.  And so are my kids.  They walk in the door and the first thing I'm harping on is, put your stuff away, go clean your room.  It's just a never ending list of jobs spouting from my mouth because with five kids, I can't stop for even ten minutes or the whole house falls apart.

You know how sometimes the Heavens send you a little wake-up call to get you going in the right direction? Well that happened to me this week.  It came in the form of a flood.  What's weird is that not two weeks ago I was downstairs in my disaster of a basement and thought to myself. "Holy Buckets!  Can you imagine if we had a flood down here?  That would be SOOOOO bad because we have so much stuff piled on stuff down here."  And guess what?  Monday morning I go downstairs and our water softener had been leaking for a couple of days and half of my office was completely soaking wet.   So I put on my puddle boots and grabbed some garbage sacks and started chucking wet fabric, ribbon and flowers like a crazy person. 

The Lord knew I needed a kick in the pants and a kick start to my reduce the crap in my life plan.  I'm now on a mission to drastically reduce all the excess in my life.  I'll try to write more about my experience and how it changes my life (hopefully for the better).  Right now I'm in the midst of chaos.  I've gotten rid of a bunch of stuff but not enough.  I still am spending all of my time putting it all back over and over again.  I guess I'm still scared that once it's all gone, I'm going to go and buy it all again.

How do you keep up on your life?  Have you tried to simplify only to go right back to where you were before?   

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