My Journey to Minimalism

I’m starting to call myself a minimalist, but truthfully I suppose I’m a minimalist in training. I have the desire to get rid of a ton of my stuff (clutter) but I’m maintaining a reasonable pace and instead of just tossing everything in a dumpster I’m trying to sell some of it for a little cash as well and give other things to people that can use them.

I started being aware of the concept of simple living back in the 90’s when I read books by Elaine St. James. She was the first to open my eyes to the concept that you can have a good life without so much “stuff.” I think I liked the concepts and her ideas but still kept all the stuff I had, just made a few changes like only having one of something instead of multiples in various locations.

After I got married and had kids a lot of my simple living tendencies went out the window for a few years. While I kept all my old collections (sports cards / comic books / coins / stamps / matchbox cars, etc) I also added stuff through my interest in the Green Bay Packers and also the relatively new hobby, geocaching. So, I filled up my personal space with more junk and left all the other stuff in the attic for just in case.

So now it’s 2010 and I started getting serious about getting rid of stuff about 18 months ago. A positive thing has been that while the “getting rid of” phase is going slow I have managed to stop the intake of new stuff.