Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
We live in a strange time.
No one is right. You can’t say someone else is wrong.
Everyone is anxious. No one gets enough sleep.
Diet culture and BMI are crap. Doctors ask if you’re able to lose weight easily, as if that’s a marker of health.
We buy things in pursuit of happiness, but then we are overwhelmed by the state of our homes.
Minimalism sounds restrictive.
Minimalism sounds amazing!
Minimalism sounds like a lot of work; maybe too much work.
We are fine.
(We are not fine.)
We are paralyzed by our stuff.
Why can’t we do/have/be it all??
Something has to change.
The price of contentment
We are being cast in a play of discontentment and we keep to our character when we walk the role of seeking our own desires.
This path has masses of people. It is wide and easy. There are bright colors and mindless entertainment everywhere we look. There is everything you are being sold on social media to be the thing that makes or breaks your life. This broad easy winding path takes you through an indulgent life, but leads to dissatisfaction and ultimately death.
Sorry, there’s no nice way to say where the path goes at the end of an easy life of following the crowds or living for yourself.
Your house. Your mindset.
If I could give you advice, I would say start to change now.
I know that I struggle with perfectionism and wanting everything else to be done that is normal, before starting anything special. This really postpones doing those out-of-the-ordinary things like decluttering and deciding whether to own something or not, working out, or writing more than daily journaling.
I tend to wait for the “perfect moment” to start, where my house, body, and children are all clean and I’ve checked off schooling, meal planning, and cooking. When all those things are in check, that is my conditional perfect moment. It lasts for approximately 7 minutes.
Stop waiting for perfect conditions
My advice is to let the house be for a minute, let the kids be without dictation, and release thinking about what’s for dinner tonight/this week/ all month because you weren’t going to meal plan right now anyway. Go to that trouble hotspot that drives you crazy.
Look for garbage first. Then things that have a home that can be put away – and put them away. After, look for things you don’t even want and you can throw them away and do not feel guilty about them going into the garbage because you’re going to feel so much better when it’s out of your house!
Trash bag therapy is truly freeing. You will be shocked at how much better you feel after filling a bag of things to leave your house. You might also be shocked at how many bags you fill and how much lighter you feel as a person.
When I started decluttering, I was on a whole journey of self healing. And, while eating well for myself, prioritizing fun, and focusing more energy on myself have all come in and out of season, what hasn’t gone out is desiring less stuff in my house.
I have not ever counted the items that left my house. I don’t know what percentage is gone. I only know how I felt in my house when I started: I was overwhelmed , exhausted, and anxious all the time. Then I got rid of three truckloads full of stuff and everything changed.
I could handle my day, my house was easier to keep up on, i wasn’t anxious from my environment. With freer brain space, I created boundaries, learned to say “no”, stopped comparing myself, and the biggest shift; I was happy!
Having less stuff and seeing all of the positive effects really gave me motivation to keep getting rid of things. It was my newest healthy habit and it stuck.
Current state
That was 3 1/2 years ago, and I am still reaping the benefits of the practices that changed my life.
Have I gotten to the point where our house feels good all the time? No I haven’t. I still have regular times where I look around and I get overwhelmed. But I know that it’s not as bad as it used to be and it’s not as bad as it could be if I were to give up.
Have I given up on decluttering as a method of changing my life and mental state? No. The benefits are so all-encompassing that I couldn’t replace them if I hired a maid, a nutritionalist, and a therapist. Decluttering is waaaay cheaper than any single one of those anyway!
So my advice is to start now that one thing that you really want to do it somehow you feel like you can’t start with the first step. You can’t expect the beginning of your road to look like the middle or the end result of somebody else’s. Just like I can’t expect my blog to look like or sound like or be like blogs that have been going for 3, 5, 10, or even 15 years.