Simplicity: Your Journey Won’t Be the Same as Mine
We all have a different journey, based on interests, reasons and loves
When it comes to living a simple life, we all have our own journey. There are several ways to live out the ideal simple life, however we need to make sure that it’s an ideal that works for us.
When I started working on my own simple journey, I read a lot of great blogs. I wanted to be more like the authors and adapted their ideas as gospel. I wanted to build a complete capsule wardrobe in 33 pieces via Project333 and have a packing party to get rid of 75% of my things like the Minimalists. I used their ideas to begin the process to change my life.
It starts that way in many things- we copy and steal methods until we’re more comfortable deciding what’s right for us. We tinker with the ideas of others to see what it feels like in our own life. I’m thankful that there are so many great content creators within the minimalist movement.
However, when we get past the copy and paste stage, we need to decide what’s right for us. We can still be inspired by someone else’s ideas or experiment with a concept that they bring forth. My year of experiences instead of purchasing things was inspired by The Year of Less by Cait Flanders.
However, someone else’s ideals won’t always work for us. There are a multitude of people choosing to live more simply and that looks different from person to person. Some people who choose to live with simplicity:
- live out of a backpack and hit the road in their RV
- have a certain number of possessions- see 100 Thing Challenge
- Choose to take on prolongued periods of no shopping
- minimize in different areas of their lives while allowing 1–2 indulgences
- focus on internal simplicity and don’t worry too much about possessions
It takes time to figure out what your brand of simplicity is. However, it’s likely your brand won’t be a mirror of mine. The same way my simple lifestyle is not the same as anyone else’s.
There are a few reasons why:
our purposes will be different: what draws you to a simple life? Is it having less clutter and wanting to feel freer from other obligations? Do you want to travel the world? Is it that by practicing simplicity you find that your mental health is improving? Knowing your purpose will lead to trying different concepts in simplicity. It will lead to you knowing what will and won’t work for you.
our “rules” will be different: what works for me might not work for you. The ideas we choose to incorporate into a simple life might not match. For example, I try to maintain minimalistic rules when it comes to possessions, except for books. Books might not be very important to you, but your collection of movies that bring you joy might have a permanent place in your life.
our goals will be different: one of my long term goals is to have an RV so I can travel and stay in Erie for long stretches of time. I’d love to have just little enough to take everything with me. Maybe living in another town isn’t important to you or on the flip side, you want to travel around the world. Simplicity helps each of us by saving time, money and letting us build the dream.
What we choose to incorporate will be different: there are a lot of ideas floating around the simplicity and minimalism world. However, what connects with me might not connect with you.
We are different people: if you asked five people to describe the same concept, it’s likely you’ll get five different answers. For example, if you asked them what their writing process is, you’ll get some of the same concepts: sitting down and writing. However, do they write with paper, on a tablet or a phone? Do they measure based on word count or by time writing? What side of the quality versus quantity debate are they on? Not everyone will view the writing process exactly the same way. Similarly, we won’t all see simplicity the same way.
There’s this idea of keeping up with the minimalists. To compare our journeys with those of others. However, I believe in reading about other journeys, trying out different things that sound interesting and seeing what resonates for me. You don’t have to keep up with anyone. This is your choice.
Our journeys won’t be the same. Often, when we share our journeys it’s so that others can be inspired. It’s to introduce what works or does’t work for us so that we can encourage others to try it.
Bottom line: what works for me won’t work for you and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, diversity is the spice of life. If you decide to start or expand this journey, it’ll improve your life. However, only you get to decide what that looks like.
