Simplicity

Like most people I have a lot of clutter. I never realised just how much shit I collected over the years until, about 5 years ago, I embraced my mid-life crisis and went backpacking after selling, giving away, storing or binning most of my gear. It took days to get rid of it all, even though I lived in a small, one bedroom apartment and never considered myself a hoarder.

Literature based on spiritual and emotional relaxation will invariably tell you that having a good clear out is good for your soul as it tells the universe that you are willing to move on and make your life stress free.

I agree with this to a great extent, mainly because I’ve noticed just how much of a mess I tend to let my flat get into when I’m distracted or anxious.

Recently I took time out to look at just how much more crap I could throw out and this time it was surprising. For a one-room apartment (what is romantically called a ‘studio’) there were about 3 big bin liners of clothes, nik-naks and toys that I had picked up in moments of “ooh, that would look nice on the shelf/ next to the TV/ in the kitchen!”

The thing is…once it was all done and dusted I genuinely felt a little more at ease. The toy car from the Easter egg that I had next to my toothbrush. The baby-shaped stress toy that I had intended to give to a student because we both agreed it looked like her daughter. The cat brush that I never used. All gone and no longer there and as a result even my thought processes became a little less complicated.

Simplicity seems to work because, like Louise L Hay said “the universe loves symbolic gestures”. The more meaningless or useless stuff I had around the more my mind would go off on tangents.

As a back up to this I then decided to go through my phone and delete all the apps that I never or rarely used. I thought there would be about 4 or 5 but I ended up deleting 18.

The problem I always found was that I had some kind of residual attachment to the items in my life and wanted to keep them for fear that losing them might create some kind of unbearable boredom. I never used to understand people who live alone and don’t own televisions. Now I get it.

Simplicity so far has felt pretty good.