Sweating the small stuff

Home Is Where One Starts


With a purchaser for our house at the ready, the organising hat has been put on. This is a stressful time because so many things could just as well go wrong, and we could end up not selling. Anyhow, we are on the road of uncertainty to somewhere else, which means that my head is full of things to do, plants to save, pots to water, etc.

I phoned around a few removal firms to ask them to give us a quotation to move us from A to B and one of them commented:

Actually, you have very little stuff to move.

Music to my ears. One of those eureka and satisfying moments, when a downshifter realises that indeed, it is noticeable that there is little stuff about. A few months ago my Aunt visiting commented that you could see the house was for sale, it was so tidy and nothing much on show. There is not much to show really, a life without stuff is very liberating. When the man checked the inside of my wardrobe he was shocked.........that will fit in one special box. We are now unusual I guess, not very much stuff but when you have little stuff you do not need to store it, service it, insure it, clean it, move it, look at it......you get the picture.

You might now think how it is possible to live a satisfying life with little stuff. I dare you to try it, give some of the stuff another home, reduce your needs, reuse your stuff or give it away to someone who will appreciate it.

The only challenge I have at the moment is how we are going to move the food larder and the jams......the removal man assured me that he was quite capable of handling jam jars with kid gloves, food had been moved and stored before.

We are going to be radical this move....we will not be moving out and moving in on the same day. Who really needs that kind of pressure. It is a luxury we have available, Time. We will be moving slowly, out one day, then the small stuff will go in storage for a week or so while we clean the house we leave, hand it over and then move into the new house, when we have cleaned it, opened the windows and looked at it with fresh eyes.

We will technically be homeless or in between homes for a while, and as where it would have scared me in the past, I know that I can do without the stuff, I am who I am and as I cannot take it with me in the end, I have come to realise that I have an identity without my stuff. My life may well be in boxes in the next few weeks to come but when it comes down to it......there is very little I need on a daily basis. ( The food larder is giving me headaches still though, shall I can, shall I wait......)