How I became a minimalist. (Part 1/2)

It was a hot day in New York. We’ve been in a pseudo nomad state of living for three weeks, jumping from a fancy boutique hotel in Williamsburg to a three-star hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, and finally moved to a one bedroom Airbnb in Park Slope. We just wrapped up our convenient but slightly uninspiring suburban life in California and moved to New York City. My husband transferred to his New York office, and I left my job at a tech company.

We waited for our stuff to arrive for a month instead of two weeks. We had sent our daughter, Lola (3YO) to Italy to spend the summer with nonna — a unique blend of a fairy godmother and top chef, widely known as an ‘Italian grandmother’ — so that she didn’t have to tag along in the frustrating journey of cross-continental moving. If it weren’t for this precaution, those four weeks would have been significantly more challenging. Instead, I practically considered it as an extended vacation — sort of like, ‘me time, all the time’. I was going to worry about moving and decorating the apartment later ‘con calma’ (calmly), which means that you take all the time you want to do a certain thing in Italian. (and boy oh boy was I wrong about this).

I immediately adopted the Italian attitude towards time, regarding it as an infinite resource rather than something that you just don’t have enough. I liberally made social engagements in the evening, sketched custom-made furniture pieces, and enjoyed Shake Shack burgers every once in a while. Everything else I wanted to do once I quit my job — learning Italian, taking real estate classes, doing some art again — could wait.

And it was one of these days that I came across the book that ultimately guided me to where I am today, effortlessly titled as ‘Goodbye things’ by Fumio Sasaki, while I was browsing home decoration section at the local Barnes and Nobles. My goal was to pick up ‘coffee table books’ that I can also refer to when I start decorating the apartment — thick, hard covered with neatly organized Pantone color swatches and photos of celebrity living rooms inside.

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The vision that never came to be. [Source: The Idle Man]

But something about those books, which the bookstore had plenty of, was weirdly off-putting. Yes, Ellen DeGenerous surely seems like she has great ideas for setting up a guest bedroom for a ranch style townhouse, but what is that got to do with my modest living situation? It felt like displaying a book that dedicates a whole section on gallery-style wall decoration is silly for a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment that has barely any wall space that is not a door, window, hallway, radiator or bookshelf.

When I picked up ‘Goodbye Things,’ quietly shining in the corner like a freshwater pearl among multi-color gemstones, I felt some sort of relief. The idea of not having things, or letting all the things go, was liberating. (Of course, I was already stuffing new things in its place in my head, which was not the point).

I read the whole book in three days. Following the journey of the transformation was simply fascinating. I also appreciated the self-reflective tone that ran through the entire book. Fumio was not here to lecture — he was here to just share some tips, and to confess. Cleaning up his possessions led to cleaning up his life, getting his affairs in order, saving more and ultimately living a healthier life. When I got to the part where he declares his love to someone after regaining some confidence of himself, I couldn’t help cheering for him with my whole heart. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work out.)

And so I was ready to take the leap of faith. I wasn’t going to throw away all my furniture and sleep on a foldable futon (and my husband says ‘thank god’ for this), but the principle was the same: do not own anything that you do not need. It was a bit more regimented and easier to understand than Kon Marie way (‘Only keep the things that spark joy’ — because I need to keep a pair of scissors, no matter how boring they are). The best way to rationalize and internalize this principle was — as materialistic as it was — to think that you are paying RENT for all that stuff. This was particularly compelling when I thought about how much we paid for something so small. If I do the math correctly, owning things is much more expensive than NOT owning things. Could we afford to live in a small apartment and save thousands of dollars every month, if we didn’t own all these things? This was absolutely true. Living in the city all my life, I never had a desire to own a big house. What matters is that I own (read: rent) a space that can bring people together and make them comfortable in their own skin.

This could be me, minus the futon (and plus the queen size bed). [Source:mindful.org]

Excited and energized with my newly found lifestyle philosophy, I started to set up a mental model and plan for the move in. I jotted down a goal in a notebook and detailed out how our apartment should be when we are fully moved in. Here’s what it looked like:

Goal: Everything we have in the house at any given moment is used frequently OR periodically.

What it means to have ‘moved in’:

1. 1. All boxes are open.

1. 2. Everything we keep has a place.

1. 3. Things we don’t need are either thrown away, recycled or donated.

1. 4. We are done with shopping for the apartment. We have everything we need.

1. 5. We don’t own two of anything. We own one.

1. 6. We have a system to regularly sort out and refresh Lola’s things.

1. 7. We have mentally moved on with our lives from moving.

I showed this page to my husband and got a consensus. Sharing the Amazon account with me and knowing all about my costly habit of throwing money at the problems (‘We need to get the third automatic cat feeder that we’ll probably never use because cats are meowing in the middle of the night’) he couldn’t quite hide his skepticism, but he was on board with what we were trying to achieve. I bet more space for human beings sounded good for him, too.

Now I know that #4 will never be, #5 is unwise, and #7 is possible without checking all the boxes. But it wasn’t so obvious at the time. With all due respect to a plain common sense, it was truly a journey to understand this.

So I waited for our stuff to finally arrive. Competent, and ready to take a crack at it.