Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Everything Must Go!

About a month ago, much to my mother’s delight, I finally got around to cleaning up and putting away all of the stuff that I had brought home from college. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. Books were in boxes, towels were in drawers, and my clothes were all over the place - in baskets, in piles on the floor, and even one or two shirts in my dresser drawers. I decided to make piles of everything and figure out where to go from there, so I started to throw my clothes into one corner of my room. By the time that I tossed on that last wrinkled tee-shirt, the pile was as big as my twin bed and half as useful. It was the first time that I had ever had such a clear visual of the sheer amount of clothes that I had. There was no way I needed that many clothes, so I decided right then and there to get rid of at least half of what I saw in front of me. I ended up donating six garbage bags of clothes, bags, and shoes to Goodwill. Dropping those bags off was a great feeling, but coming home and seeing how much less I had was even better. For years, I’ve been a believer in less stuff. Who needs it all? People need to downsize, not supersize. Coming face to face with my stuff in such a concrete way reinforced that to me, and made it more real than ever. Those six bags were just a start. Even more is going to be on it’s way out, and it’s not just going to be clothes next time.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Just Begin.

Stop stalling, forget the plans, and run down the path to see what’s around the next bend or over the next hill. Life can pass you by while you’re still putting on your shoes.

That’s something I often have to remind myself of. I get caught up in the ideas and the planning so much that sometimes I never really begin. I’ve adjusted the fonts and colors on this page more times than I care to recall, and the layout has changed at least twice, but somehow, I never got around to writing a single post. Then, today while I was sitting out in my backyard watching the afternoon’s rain drip off the eaves as the sun finally came out, I could hear the kids next door planning their game of “summer camp”. They spent an hour plotting out exactly where everything would be, and planning what they would do. I suddenly realized that I was doing the exact same thing. The dream is part of the fun, but too much preparation and you’ll wake up one day and find that you never set your feet out the door.

When I finally sat down to write though, I realized that I had planned everything out except for this post. I had no idea what to write. I may plan, but I often don’t plan well. Everything ran through my head at once: my tiny house dream, random observations, how I found the small house movement, family, art, poetry... I was stuck back in the planning stage all over again.

I stopped for a moment, listening to the rain fall outside (it started again sometime around sunset). I needed to just begin.