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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Carrie Olsen. I had braces as an adult, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned on minimalism.
Today’s Fun Fact: A snail can sleep for more than three years at a time. But… how do they not starve to death??
What I Learned Yesterday:
I have a unique relationship with the stuff in my life. My family had a house fire when I was 18, and we lost everything, including pictures. A few years later, after moving from rental to rental, I bought a house for my family to live in. As we all moved on in life and eventually moved out of the house, I found myself carting around a ton of stuff with me each time I move. I would have stuff in my apartment that I never used or even took out of its box.
When I married Derek, we ended up having a lot of duplicate stuff, as many newly married couples do. Now, Derek is a self-proclaimed minimalist. He used to take pride in saying that he only has three shirts. Clutter was the worst thing in the world to him. So when we got married, we ended up getting rid of some of my stuff, which was hard, but I still held on to quite a bit. Eventually, we planned on taking an epic road trip across the county in a travel trailer. And somehow we came to the decision that we should get rid of half of our stuff before taking off. I agreed, but I didn’t know how I was going to handle it emotionally.
It was hard. But it got easier. Since we got rid of half of our stuff, there is only thing that I found myself wishing I had that we got rid of. There’s a book I wish we’d kept. But I suppose I can always find it somewhere else. Other than that, though, I haven’t missed a single thing that we got rid of in the purging.
Here’s what I learned.
Stuff doesn’t define you. But more impactful and surprising to me, you won’t die if you get rid of stuff. A meteor doesn’t crash into Earth. You don’t become a different person. Life pretty much goes on the way it always has. Except, you have more room. You feel less weighed down. It actually becomes liberating to get rid of things. And it gives you physical space, as well as emotional space to try new things.
I’m Carrie Olsen and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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