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type_wildThere's this idea that your "someday"-things cause bad conscience and stress, and ultimately procrastination. The language-learning book you never finished, the books you never read, the games you haven't played. For me, add the art equipment rarely used, and a shitton of bullet journal BS that I just couldn't make look as good as simple black lines and highlight markers. And the keyboard I don't practice my chords on and the books of songs I've never played, the sewing machine I ultimately never used for all the fancy DIY stuff, and for years now, the spinning wheel I inherited from my grandmother.
The idea is that they feel bad becaues we know we should be using them. I should be reading the ninetysomething unread books, I should be studying French vocabulary, I should be using one of the three different sets of coloured pencils, not to speak about the unopened sets of plain drawing pencils. I should be playing one of my fifty handheld games, I should be watching one of the eight unwatched anime box-sets, or my Crunchyroll queue, or the three or so reasons I subscribed to HBO for a while, and let's not talk about all my half-finished fanfic.
If I was serious about minimalism, the sewing machine and the keyboard would go instantly, along with the eight years worth of sheet music from two different ensembles and one choir, the six-ish music books and the pile of printed and photocopied piano music, two different sets of watercolour and six tubes of acrylic paint, a ton of pencils too soft for writing, a Japanese-German dictionary, a "teach yourself French" book (also in German), six shelves of books, a food processor cum blender, a Wii, two DVD players, a GBA, a DS Lite, a 3DS, a typewriter, a shameful amount of markers and fineliners and gel pens.
In the pits of self-improvement reddit, there is a vision of my life where I keep only a tightly curated collection of books and DVDs; my pile of notebooks is gone, replaced with a single one, and a single sketchbook in which I draw with one of the fine ballpoint pens that has been my go-go art equipment for a decade and half. My harddrive is emptier. My three different online bookmarking systems are tidier. I practice my clarinet.
Our things are our identity, and it's telling, isn't it, that I could throw out half my wardrobe and cooking utensils and dishware and knick-knacks and curtains with no problem. But when it gets close to the creative side - the things I want to make, the art I want to consume - I find it deeply uncomfortable to resign myself to the fact that yeah, I'll need five years to get it all done, and should just spare myself the bad conscience of everything undone and throw it out and forget about it, already.
A small-ish step in the right direction is that I did sit down with the spinning wheel and having spun the two wheels of wool my grandmother left behind, now find myself wanting more. (though this comes with the downside of getting rid of the yarn I make, because I've got enough yarn lying around from before ha ha ha )
The idea is that they feel bad becaues we know we should be using them. I should be reading the ninetysomething unread books, I should be studying French vocabulary, I should be using one of the three different sets of coloured pencils, not to speak about the unopened sets of plain drawing pencils. I should be playing one of my fifty handheld games, I should be watching one of the eight unwatched anime box-sets, or my Crunchyroll queue, or the three or so reasons I subscribed to HBO for a while, and let's not talk about all my half-finished fanfic.
If I was serious about minimalism, the sewing machine and the keyboard would go instantly, along with the eight years worth of sheet music from two different ensembles and one choir, the six-ish music books and the pile of printed and photocopied piano music, two different sets of watercolour and six tubes of acrylic paint, a ton of pencils too soft for writing, a Japanese-German dictionary, a "teach yourself French" book (also in German), six shelves of books, a food processor cum blender, a Wii, two DVD players, a GBA, a DS Lite, a 3DS, a typewriter, a shameful amount of markers and fineliners and gel pens.
In the pits of self-improvement reddit, there is a vision of my life where I keep only a tightly curated collection of books and DVDs; my pile of notebooks is gone, replaced with a single one, and a single sketchbook in which I draw with one of the fine ballpoint pens that has been my go-go art equipment for a decade and half. My harddrive is emptier. My three different online bookmarking systems are tidier. I practice my clarinet.
Our things are our identity, and it's telling, isn't it, that I could throw out half my wardrobe and cooking utensils and dishware and knick-knacks and curtains with no problem. But when it gets close to the creative side - the things I want to make, the art I want to consume - I find it deeply uncomfortable to resign myself to the fact that yeah, I'll need five years to get it all done, and should just spare myself the bad conscience of everything undone and throw it out and forget about it, already.
A small-ish step in the right direction is that I did sit down with the spinning wheel and having spun the two wheels of wool my grandmother left behind, now find myself wanting more. (though this comes with the downside of getting rid of the yarn I make, because I've got enough yarn lying around from before ha ha ha )
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Date: 2019-09-17 10:25 pm (UTC)Well, yeah. The conventional minimalism wisdom, though, is that if I really wanted to do those things, I'd have done them already, and that the reason I've accumulated all those creative supplies has more to do with the person I want to be rather than the person I in fact am (and because I don't use them, they serve as constant, material reminders about my own failure to live up to my best self etc etc). In order to focus on the essentials, the Good Minimalist removes the non-essential which is just stressing her out.
A lot of the reason I'm hesitating is certainly connected to that oft-whispered criticism that minimalism is the lifestyle of those who can afford to just buy it again if they find they need something they "decluttered". And I'm currently very happy that I never got into it so deep that I got rid of the spinning wheel.