The thing about moving (almost) halfway across the world is that I have to decide what does and does not come with me. For the past five months I have been making mental checklists and filtering through my belongings and deciding what I am keeping, storing or selling...in my mind. Now with five weeks before my departure date I realized mental lists are not going to make the task of purging my belongings any easier.
I have been reading several blogs on minimalism, simple living, and mindful living, initially to adopt some of their principles to make relinquishing my worldly possessions easier but a lot of the ideas expressed by these individuals have really resonated within me.
My first task was to get rid of the unnecessary, the non-useful and the just plain ugly. Using this guide, I weeded through my entire wardrobe and at least half of what I owned is now piled in three large garbage bags beside my bed, awaiting pick up for donation. Clothing was the easy part, becoming a mother has necessitated a wardrobe change anyways, my books however were a different story. My once overflowing bookshelf is now more empty than filled, and even though it broke my heart to do so I filled two large cloth shopping bags of books for donation and curated the remaining titles until I had selected the forty-ish books that I had decided I could not bear to part with.
These are just my first steps in the direction of more simple living, and they have been liberating. I am excited to implement the "less is more" philosophy into all facets of my life but it is definitely going to be a difficult process, but I think this move is the big push that I needed to get started.
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