By Samantha Bradsky | Reporter
I used to believe the chaos of my personal spaces was a part of who I was. My room was messy because I was messy. No matter what I tried, no matter how many times I cleaned it, everything seemed to descend into disorder.
I discovered that the key to having less mess is to simply have less stuff. As someone who was once accustomed to living in a space of total disarray, I have become someone who can’t stand a messy room — something I truly thought would never happen to me.
Let’s define minimalism. Author Nicholas Burroughs said, “Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something.”
Minimalism is not a full-out rejection of stuff; it’s just a rejection of the things you won’t use or the things that act more as a burden than an item of value. It requires practicing mindfulness when it comes to purchases and acknowledging the value — or lack thereof — of the items in your life. It’s about giving yourself 24 hours before you decide to order something online or reducing clutter in workspaces so that you feel like your most productive self.
Marie Kondo, the author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” said, “The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”
One neglected thing in this practice, however, is limiting waste. That is the key. After following a mixture of Kondo’s art of decluttering and Project 333 — a minimalist fashion challenge — I discovered a tip to minimize items while simultaneously minimizing waste when it comes to clothes.
When you commit to going through your clothes, separate them into four piles: trash, donate, the “love” pile and the “maybe” pile of clothes that you want to keep but you aren’t sure why. Next, take a second pass at the “maybe” pile and consider the items’ purpose in your life. Toss any you’re questioning into the donate pile. Dispose of the donate and trash piles to their respective places, and keep the “love” pile.
Here is the hack to limiting waste: Keep the “maybe” pile. Box it up and store it somewhere for a set period of time. Next time you are about to buy a bunch of clothes online, open this box up instead and exchange a few items. It’ll be like a secondhand Christmas gift from the you of the past.
This is just one example of applying a sustainable minimalist practice to your life. Minimalism can apply not only to physical items but also to the information we consume, the number of tasks we choose to prioritize and how we choose to spend our time. The practice can keep you from becoming a mindless consumer in all aspects of life.
