As I've mentioned in the past, my wife and I started an effort to living a more minimalist, simple lifestyle about a year ago. Since then we've made a bunch of changes in our lifestyle and gotten rid of at least eighty percent of the things we owned. Every step of the way has been such a mental weight off our shoulders and I can't even imagine going back to where we were before it started. I even went through the extra computer parts and networking items I had laying around. I cut my wardrobe down from a five drawer dresser and a closet's worth of clothing to one drawer of the dresser and about five items in the closet. We went form two very packed bookcases down to one much smaller bookcase that's barely more than half used...
and one small shelf with the stack of my favorite book series.
I've even gone so far as to limiting myself on how much money I spend on extraneous purchases (more on this here). But even with the removal of all the excess things we had, there was one thing I've been really hesitant to go through. You see, my wife and I spent a lot of our late teens going to concerts (shows) for local and otherwise underground/alternative bands. We actually had our first official date at a show about an hour and a half away from home. We've met some awesome people and listened to a LOT of really awesome music. We've also made a lot of really... interesting memories. One band I was in went to school with the guys in Senses Fail so naturally we played a few shows with them before they got bigger. On one such occasion my wife and her friend decided it would be "fun" to cause a little trouble...
As often as I could, I pick up a CD from the bands we'd see and enjoy. Our CD collection wasn't even limited to local bands. My wife and I are music lovers so we'd always buy music regardless of how popular or not the band was. Needless to say, that collection got pretty big. Our CD collection was really the last bit of clutter we've had around and I was kind of avoiding doing the sorting I knew I needed to. I kept thinking, "I'm going to have to pull out all the local band CDs and make sure I have them copied over to the computer." I knew that was going to take a while so I've been avoiding it. Well today I got ambitious and decided to work on some more cleaning and it didn't take long for me to realize there wasn't a lot of cleaning to do... and then there was that bag of CDs that has bee sitting on the floor of our bedroom for at least three months now. I decided it was finally time to get on to sorting them. So I finally drag myself upstairs to get the four boxes shown at the beginning of the post and decide to start sorting. Except, as I was dragging the boxes to the stairs, I stopped to consider the KonMari idea of "does it spark joy?" No way! I mean, the music we listened to and came to love certainly did spark joy and the memories of seeing a lot of those shows do, but this physical media I have laying around certainly was not. Then I started thinking about other aspects of what minimalism means to me, like being willing to simply let things go. It struck me that I've been holding these things in the attic, keeping some sort attachment to my wife in them and the more I thought about it, the more silly it sounded. I have the memories of the shows, I know the songs. There were only a couple of albums I've actually wanted to listen to badly enough to actually go searching for in the six years since they were put up there, why should I keep holding on to them "just in case"? So I decided not to. I had to separate the plastic from the paper for the sake of recycling, so I had to dig through them all and there were a few albums I was glad to come across because they reminded me I hadn't yet ripped them to mp3 and I know they are no longer available anywhere.
To sum up this ramble, this afternoon was probably the last real letting go I've had to do in our process of minimizing and gearing towards a simpler lifestyle. At this point the attic is almost empty. We'd probably be able to rent one small box truck and move our family in one trip if we had to, and that's relieving. It's been fun, and it's nice to know we're finally done with the hard part and now we're into maintenance mode.
