Every Monday I post Real Life Minimalists, a profile of one of my readers in their own words. If you’d like to participate, click here for details.
Today we have an update from Sacha, who was first featured in July 2015. She tells us how some difficulties over the past year have actually changed her life for the better.
Sacha writes:
In July 2015 I wrote about the ways I tried to incorporate minimalism into my life, getting rid of stuff when I moved house and my personal Doomsday Prepping tendencies.
Quite a bit happened since then. Due to a reorganisation I lost my job. So… that personal doomsday I used to fear, turned out to be a reality it seemed. But…it wasn’t a Doomsday at all, I was ok! I saw it as an opportunity instead of a threat. New Year’s Day, Birth Day, Independence Day rolled into one instead of a Doomsday. All the people around me have been a very big influence in this process. How long are you going to be hanging on? How long are you willing to sell your mental and physical wellbeing for a job and the required travel time? Wouldn’t you have more time to enjoy life if you didn’t have 12+ hours of travelling each week? My goal was to find a new job close to home, max 30 minutes by bike. The commute was getting too complicated to be ‘stressless’ with the ever present danger of trains getting cancelled.
Now I have found a new job in my home town and I am enjoying my time off before I start my new job at a great company and pretty nice future colleagues. I have been sending loads of things to goodwill since most things were getting on my already frayed nerves. I have been getting rid of old striped wallpaper and replaced that with plain white walls. I have bought mason jars for my rice, sugar etc to replace half open packages. I have been rediscovering my artwork again. My bedroom is a white haven with my colourful collages lined up against one wall. I have started two Instagram accounts to minimize photo albums and maximize the fun I have looking at my photos regularly and venting my quirky view on the world around me (I have a personal one and I have one for my scarves).
I have been working in my garden a lot, started yoga and eating better and better after attending a Salutogenese workshop, giving workshops on how to make scarves, connecting with kindred spirits online and offline and I have three little ladies in the garden now (I kept one of the chicks that hatched last year) and I have been trying to go ‘zero waste’… well…. ‘less waste’ to be more accurate, I am trying to ‘brew’ my own kombucha. My happy hippy inner child has a happier outer adult now since the difficulties I faced over the last 12 months turned out to be a godsend in hindsight. I am finding out that I have built in rose tinted glasses.
{If you’d like to learn more about minimalist living, please consider reading my book, The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide, or joining my email list.}
Congratulations Sacha, I’m pleased you are making things work for you. I love the comment about the built in rose tinted glasses; that is a good way to live.
I enjoyed your message of hope in the face of job loss. I too lost my job of 18 years when our office closed, and it was life changing. I had become very fed up commuting to and from the city every day, to a workplace where we all got on great but were at the mercy of HQ politics, and always feeling the axe hanging over our heads. Now I have a 10-minute commute to work. The initial uncertainty re finding a new job seems scary, but it passes and life really can be better. My job is secure, more meaningful and my new colleagues rock.
Now I earn less but have lower outgoings and more time to myself. A lot of that time is spent looking at stuff I can lose. I recently moved back to my home that I was renting out so I’m being fairly ruthless as I continue to unpack. Many of my things got a bit grubby in storage and I now think ‘Is that worth cleaning?’ – the answer is often no, and I’m feeling lighter with every item that goes.
Thanks for this! Beautiful pictures, beautiful scarves, too. I had to look up Salutogenesis, and may research it a bit.
Dear Steph, Diz and Caroline,
Thank you for your reactions…. it is fun to see you reacting to different parts of my story :-)
I am happy that I am starting a life that is more locally based and which offers more free time to enjoy hobbies and volunteer work.
So glad to hear you are looking into zero waste! For me, I find that minimalism promotes mindful and intentional living and find that zero waste fits into mindful living very well.
I totally agree Hillary!
I found this post I had never read. My husband threw out two big boxes of old photos and negatives. He didn’t know what or who they were pictures of. I said they may have been his folks’ pictures. I try not to throw away food. We had tortilla chips left and I am trying not to finish them. Someone suggested smashing them and using them in scrambled eggs. I make fried rice out of all sorts of hits of vegetables and rice and a few eggs, but I never tried taco chips.