Your Life on Light and Simple
On purging more than just possessions
You can outgrow people as well as clothes. And ideas. We go through life acquiring things, relationships, and assumptions. Our phones tell us to buy more crap, for ourselves and our friends.
But getting rid of stuff feels good, too.
Sometimes, it feels even better.
You don’t always know when to purge. I’ve learned to spot the signs. My mind starts to feel slow, heavy. It wants to dance and play, but there’s not enough room. Thoughts trip over clutter.
Inspiration steps in last week’s takeout.
One of my relatives is a landlord. He gets to see inside lots of people’s homes. A while back, he told us about a graduate student who lived in squalor. Dishes everywhere. Clothes everywhere.
Basically, everything everywhere.
No surprise, she had a bug problem. Repairmen couldn’t get work done. So my landlord friend had to show her own to clean and organize.
I’ve tended to have the opposite problem. People see my blank walls shelves and think they need to buy me photographs and Knick knacks. I’ve got a closet full of unhung art.
One of my friends asked me, “How do you live like this?” She went through my apartment and assessed my happiness based on how much furniture I had. She concluded I was depressed.
“And you only have one bowl.” She showed me the bowl, as if I didn’t already know. “How does that work?”
“Well,” I said. “When I’m done eating, I wash it.”
My friend stood in my empty kitchen, where a dining room table might’ve gone. “But what if you have people over?”
Like me, she was in grad school. Neither one of us had time to have people over. And yet, her apartment look like a real adult’s place. She had all the furniture you’d expect. Plus, a fully furnished guest room.
Why? Because that’s how a home should look. My friend couldn’t tolerate the truth of an unfurnished apartment rented by someone like me, bound to move out in two years. To her, it looked sad. It didn’t matter if we’d both come here solely to get our doctorates, that we’d be gone soon. She’d have…
