I started this course to learn an organized system to declutter. After donations were banned during the pandemic, I realized I tend to hang on to many things due to sentimental reasons or because it may be useful later for a project when I have more time. But my clutter and all these unfinished projects […]
Balancing Busy with Being
It appears as if the world has woken up from its pandemic slumber. A few months ago the streets were empty. However, today, in my neighborhood, the restaurants have their windows and doors wide open and appear to be full of mostly happy, young, and vibrant people, excitedly reuniting with one another. While acknowledging the […]
Fear Not
Fear. It raises your heartbeat, roils your stomach, it might even make your hands shake. Fear is not just stressful, it’s limiting. When I fear something new, something I don’t know how to do, a difficult decision – I just want to turn away from it. I want to do anything else but deal with […]
How My Children Shaped My Minimalism
I started my search for a simplistic life when my kids were born. At the time, we were living in a small two-bedroom flat in a busy town. We did not have a back garden and had to walk to find green space. The traffic was awful. I felt claustrophobic and anxious thinking, “Is this […]
5 Ways I Quiet My Mind
Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth, discusses that whether we are aware of it or not there is a constant flow of thoughts streaming through our mind. These thoughts projected out into the world on a speaker would sound insane. A jumble of words that may or may not make sense filling our brain. We […]
Just Like This
Whenever I hear that song by Coldplay, “Just Like This,” it makes me smile and think. (And dance). How many times do I long for something more? How many times do I expect superhero perfection from my loved ones? What if instead of looking out and wanting something like that, I looked in and said, […]
The Me That Could Be
The summer sun is blazing and it’s another humid day in Virginia. I see a few pairs of shorts in my drawer, but I pick a pair of cropped pants again. The shorts are too tight on me, but they’ll fit me next year. Right? I step outside to do some weeding in the front […]
3 Steps to Cultivate Passion in Your Life
To paraphrase Joshua Fields Millburn “Passion isn’t followed, it’s cultivated.” Wow. I never thought about it like that before. I always considered passion to be all-consuming. Something that I just HAVE to do, forsaking all else. But in his book, Everything That Remains, Millburn suggests that passion is a choice. We choose to cultivate our […]
Wait For It
“…Once you know what pain point you’re trying to avoid and what benefits you’re trying to amplify, other approaches emerge.” That observation, written by Cal Newport in A World Without Email, referred to the ways people and companies have chosen to combat relentless email overload. This essay isn’t about the email conundrum, however. We all […]
How to Become a Minimalist Without Decluttering… Yet
One of the biggest obstacles to becoming a minimalist is summoning the energy and making the time to undo what we’ve done for so many years. Now, I loved the process of decluttering once I did it, the lightness I gained as I finally let things go, and the feeling that the items I was […]