Hello there! I’m glad to have you here again. We are currently on part 3 of letting go of the things in life that no longer serve us. In case you missed parts 1 & 2, in a nutshell we are looking at three main concepts.
- Are the things in my house serving the life I am currently living?
- Are the things in my house serving the life I WANT to be living?
- Are the things in my house supporting the direction I want my life to be moving?
During parts 1 & 2 I talked about the first question. Today I would like to move on to the second question. “Are the things in my house/home serving the life I WANT to be living?”
For many of us, I think, the life we ARE living, isn’t really synonymous with, the life we WANT to be living. For myself at least, I know that the life I AM living is not even close to the life I WANT to be living. The life I AM living puts me spending hours every day trying to maintain chaos. The life I WANT to be living has me spending most of those hours doing other things. Writing, traveling, taking pictures of people and places. All things I struggle to do in the life I am living because I don’t have time or money to do them. Although I am closer to the life I want to live than I was a year ago, sometimes the gap can still feel overwhelmingly vast. Looking at the gap I identified two things that are standing between me and the life I want to live. Money and time. Now, for me, I’m also a writer. In order to make money, I need to write. In order to write, I need time. So, at the end of the day, what is standing between me and the life I want to be living? TIME.
So I had to myself this question, “How can you make time when you have none to spare?” In a way, the answer is very simple. The time must be taken away from something else. But what? Looking at all the things I am cramming to do in my day; laundry, cooking, cleaning, eating, sleeping, homeschooling two kids… where was I supposed to take the time from? One night when I actually had the house to myself for a couple of hours, (Did you see the blue moon that night, lol?) I made a schedule of my week. From the time I got up til the time I went to bed, trying to find more hours to work on my writing. My results weren’t encouraging. By the time I got done I didn’t even know how I was accomplishing what I was accomplishing in the course of a week already. There simply wasn’t anywhere to cut. The closest thing I had to downtime was walking from the coffee pot to my home office to get to work. When I was complaining about it to my Ma on the phone that week, I told her I didn’t even know how I was going to have time to call anybody and talk to them. She then asked me if I was ‘breaking up with her.’ She’s such a character, lol. But that really brought to light how important it was and how necessary it was for something in my life to change. Which again brought me back to this question, “How can you make time when you have none to spare?” And the answer, “The time must be taken away from something else.” But what? Where? How?
All these questions did was lead me to another question. “Where do I feel like I spend the most wasted amount of time?” Well, that one had an easy answer. Why, cleaning my house of course! I clean and I clean and I clean. But is my house ever clean? NO! It still remains barely controlled chaos. Hours of my day lost only to continue living in chaos! Something had to give. Something had to change.
Change began when I looked around and realized that not everything in my home supported the life I was already living. I started removing the things in my home that no longer had a place in that life. Then, it was time to peel back the next layer of the onion and remove the things in my house that do not support the life that I want to be living. If I want to be living a life that allows for more time to write, I first have to reduce the things that are taking up my time. Cleaning takes up too much time. How do I make cleaning take up less time? By having less things to clean. And in some cases by changing the way I clean to be more productive. A good example of this would be when I sorted through my dust catchers. (I really don’t like dust catchers. I’m allergic to dust. So dusting is doubly painful for me in that sense, plus allergy attacks really slow down all progress.) I took pictures of the ones I was less attached to and then I liberated them. For the remainder I got rid of the shelves they were on and I replaced it with a little display case. Now, all the cleaning they require is a quick second wipe down. That one change by itself made a big difference in the time it took me to clean everything on those shelves. It also affected me emotionally because I would always dread having to individually clean all of the items on those shelves, which meant the dust would get even deeper before I actually dusted it. Now, it is with a light heart that I do a quick curtesy swipe over that case every week before I move on to my next task. I can easier because there are less items there to clean and because they are all contained in a manner making them easier to clean.
This question may seem kind of redundant, but I think it bears saying. ‘How do I get rid of stuff when I have already removed everything that doesn’t belong in my life as it is?’ Well, this one is a little bit harder. At least, it can be. It might even require some sacrifice. For me, I started with, ‘the extras’. To determine extras you might have to consider these and other questions.
- How many people live in my house?
- How often do I entertain?
- How many people at maximum are there at my house when I entertain?
- How often do I have the maximum amount of people at my house when I entertain?
- When I have guests over, do they ever stay overnight?
- How many hobbies do I and others at my house have?
- How often do we engage in said hobbies?
- If I were going to let go of a hobby and all of it’s ‘stuff’ which hobby do I enjoy the least?
- Do I really need more ____ than there are days of the week? (Fill in the blank. Answers will vary greatly. Examples might be coats, hats, shoes, games, underwear, could be anything. For me hats would be the easy one to say, no, I don’t need that many hats. Pens on the other hand…I’m sorry, days of the week? I need enough for the days of the year, duh, lol.)
Reasons for the questions would be to consider things like, how many spoons and forks do I really need to keep on hand. If your maximum people at a time is 50, but that’s only once a year and your average people is 6, you really don’t need to have 50 forks and 50 spoons. For that one day, just pick up a package of plastic ware. It will save you from storing it and make it easier to wash up. If you really don’t want to use plastic ware, consider asking your guests to bring their own cutlery. If you have 4 people living at your house and two more who come and stay at least overnight than it is reasonable to maintain blankets and bed ware for at least six people. But not enough to house the entire neighborhood through the end of time. If you have that many blankets, it might be time to liberate a few of them.
This post has actually gone a bit longer than I intended to say the least, so I will prepare to sign off for now.
Challenge: Consider what ‘extras’ you might have a overdeveloped collection of. What might you be able to work on liberating from that collection?
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