Which brings us to today. We now live in 1,500 square feet of ORDER. There is order in my life for the first time in … ever? Tidiness and organization are suddenly effortless. Everything has a spot AND its spot is nearby. I can stand in the middle of the house and be mere feet from every other room. There’s a toy in the middle of the living room? Oh! I can just toss it into the playroom a few feet away. Hattie’s shoe is under the couch? Well, let me just hop over to the girls’ room and put it in her drawer. It’s not a whole night affair. I’m not jogging up and down stairs or hiking from one end of the house to the other.
Add that to the fact that there’s less stuff to fill the smaller space and I now feel so much lighter. Nothing is stuffed. Or stacked up high. Or wadded up. Or shoved in. There’s room for everything.
As lame and cheesy as this sounds, I feel free. Like all that stuff I’d been picking up and piling up was actually burying me.
Most importantly, I feel more hospitable because having people over isn’t nearly the chore it once was.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
Having less stuff does cause one problem: I will probably have to depend on others a bit. I will now have to borrow someone else’s ski jacket if I ever go skiing. And now that we don’t have cable, we may have to go watch a game at someone else’s house once in a while. Which probably means we should go make some new friends here. Yikes.
But isn’t that the beauty of it? We end up living more open-handedly. We reach out to others more often when we have less stuff because we no longer belong to it, or depend on it. Rather than things, we depend on people. We know what it is to share, to give and to take. To need and to meet needs.
It’s called mooching. Just kidding. It’s called community.
Gosh. I hate it when he’s right.
* The books I read were:
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
Raising Grateful Kids in An Entitled World by Kristen Welch
** The documentaries I watched were:
Happy (free on Netflix)
Minimalism (free on Netflix)
Why I Make Sure My House Is Spotless Before My Husband Gets Home
