Living
With Less
You walk into an friend’s new studio apartment,
plants adorn each corner, white walls intersect with the original brick as the space opens into a living room with floor to ceiling windows. A couch, a table, some books on a shelf, not a box to be seen & something tells you your friend hasn’t moved in entirely…
“Where’s the rest of it?” you ask, your friend replies with their revelations about minimalism, tiny homes, Marie Kondo’s “the life-changing magic of tidying up”, etc. explaining how they donated a truckload last week!
We’ve all heard about this stuff, but “letting go” can be tougher in practice than theory. WE KNOW, that we need to tidy, donate & downsize, but coming around to it is TOUGH. One thing that has helped us has been the emergence of what we like to call, “good gear.’
"choosing better gear in the face of potentially life threatening or brutally uncomfortable situations, shifted something inside us. "
Quality camping to the rescue
Sure enough, a group of our friends invited us to go camping that year and it meant getting gear, LOTS OF IT.
We went to Amazon, we shopped with Search Best, we made too many visits to REI. Long story short we learned A lot about quality. The experience of choosing better gear in the face of potentially life threatening or brutally uncomfortable situations, shifted something inside us.
We had to sacrifice our hard earned dollar for stuff that not only worked really well, but would last decades. It was an uncomfortable, but also empowering experience. We gained a sense of accomplishment and confidence from traveling far and knowing we could survive with the smallest, lightest amount of gear possible. Stuffing only the essentials into a backpack for a 47 mile trek forced us to ask the question….
"what do I really need to be happy on my hike?"
This one question flexed a muscle that translated into our home life. What kind of stuff is actually putting a smile on my face at the end of a long workday? What is actually being used at least once a year? decade?
Carrying excessively heavy bags on a long hike can make it tough to enjoy the journey. In the same way, the things we may be holding onto can dampen our spirits and make the road arduous.
Our minds know how to hold onto things:
- Our minds know how to hold onto things:
- It's too valuable to donate
- My "insert relative" gave it to me
- I MIGHT NEED it later
Sometimes the objects we hold onto are in fact holding onto us via our fear of losing them. In contrast, cherishing possessions that consistently bring joy and keeping them for THAT emotion, is very different. A cost/value tradeoff occurs.
When our brains started evaluating everything from this precept, “what do I actual get repeated joy from”, it shed a new light on every knick knack.
It started for us with being COMPELLED to choose better camping gear. It can start for you by being INSPIRED to look for higher quality goods. Seeing what the world is actually purchasing, sacrificing a little bit more to purchase it, cherishing it a little bit more as a result. These are tangible things that our search engine is a catalyst for. Try it out, let us know how it works? <3
