A little too much minimalism

Yesterday on NPR’s On Point, I heard authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, founders of the website theminimalists.com, discuss the process that transformed them from people who actively pursued material gain to people devoted to a lifelong process of stripping down. One of them described an experiment in which he packed everything he owned into boxes, as if he was moving, although he wasn’t. Then he unpacked things only as he needed them, in order to find out what objects he really had use for in the course of a day, a week or a month.

We’re doing that experiment too, only not so much as an experiment in minimalism as just because it’s easier for the time being. When we moved here in spring of 2011, we thought we might be able to stay only a year; it turned into longer, but we still haven’t bothered to unpack all the boxes in the garage. In the past 20 months, we’ve done just what the minimalist author described: unpacked only what we needed. And so we too can tell what objects matter most to us.

Of course, 20 months with a family of four makes for a fairly broad range of material needs, or at least material uses. Dishes and kitchen appliances were unpacked within hours of the move; clothes and linens too. Over the next several weeks, the kids brought out games and books and craft supplies. Now that we’ve been here well over a year, any decorations we own for any particular holiday have been uncovered, and so has just about all of our athletic equipment and computer accessories. Last Labor Day weekend, we unearthed the lobster steamer and lobster crackers for the first time since moving.

So in a way, the author is right; this is a great way to see what you really need. When we do move again, we’ll have to take a very critical look at anything that has stayed boxed all this time. The only problem is that there’s one large category of items we never unpacked but that I still can’t think of as superfluous: sentimental objects. We don’t have a single wedding photo in our current house; it didn’t seem worth unwrapping them from their protective casing. In fact, we don’t have any framed photos at all here, except for the kids’ school photos, taken earlier this fall. Last summer I pulled out a few vases, but we have other knickknacks – some heirlooms passed down, some collectibles from our travels, others wedding gifts – that we haven’t bothered to pull out.

And for me, that’s a source of struggle when I contemplate the issue of minimalism. Doing without piles of, say, cloth placemats in different patterns, or CDs no one listens to, or old high school notebooks, or any of the other things that people typically accumulate in their attics or basements is definitely a positive thing. But not having any family photos around? That seems sort of sad.

So next time we move, we might try the same thing, but this time I’m determined to find that box of wedding photos and other framed pictures and unpack that box early on. Minimalism is good, but living without sentimental objects seems a little too abstemious. I miss our photos and collectibles, and I look forward to seeing them again, whenever the next round of unpacking occurs.

 

Old journals: Archive? Toss? Recycle? Pass on?

Journalist/editor Lylah Alphonse wrote here in her blog, “Write. Edit. Repeat.,” about how she is in the midst of a big decluttering project and is contemplating what to do with old journals. I know the feeling.

Like Lylah, I have a series of media on which are stored four decades of my most personal reflections: floral cloth-bound books from junior high, quaint marble-covered tablets from high school (even then I found them quaint; I just liked the way they looked), plain white typing paper from my college years, yellow lined legal pads from my twenties, and then, like Lylah, I progressed from paper to electronic journals. Also like Lylah, mine somewhat reflect the march of computer technology: floppy disks, then CDs, then thumb drives; and yes, I too know that the technology no longer exists – except maybe in computer museums – to read the files on some of those 1980’s-era floppy disks.

But it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t expect anyone to read any of these journals. Not the handwritten notebooks, not the reams of typed pages, not the computer files. They’re just too boring. How do I know this? Because I myself find them too boring to read. And I figure if anyone is going to become engrossed in my thoughts, memories, musings and experiences, it’s going to be me. It’s very hard to imagine anyone else caring. Even if some of the experiences briefly caught someone’s interest, there’s an awful lot of chaff with the meat.

But that’s okay. It’s my journal; it’s supposed to be boring. In effect, since I’m a writer by profession, my journal represents the cutting room floor. The interesting parts make it into my published articles, essays, columns and (arguably) my blog; what never gets past my journal clearly doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.

So the boxes will stay in the attic, because I cannot picture in my mind’s eye the person who would ever wish to read them. Someday my children might open them up and take a peek, but I think they’d quickly get bored. My journal is where I ruminate, analyze, argue, debate, complain. Who would want to read thousands upon thousands of words like that?

When my sisters and I were young, we found an old diary of my mother’s. We loved the fact that we’d found it, and with my mother’s (possibly grudging) permission, we read it cover to cover. But this was the diary of a 12-year-old, one who to my knowledge was not particularly interested in prose. She used it primarily for narrative purposes. Unlike me, she didn’t analyze or postulate: she briefly summarized the events of her day, and that part stayed interesting a generation later. From my mother’s diary, I learned that going to movies was something kids her age, at least in her community, did weekly if not even more often. Since movies were just an occasional treat for us, I was surprised to learn how common it was for her, and I formed the idea that it might have been because there was so little on TV at that time.

In the same way that I read about my mother going to the movies, I suppose it’s possible that a future reader of my journals might find some kind of historical interest. But really, I don’t expect there to be any future readers. The value of journal writing, as I see it, is in the process, not the product. I reap the rewards of a daily writing practice; what happens to the output really doesn't matter.

So I’ll keep writing daily, and I’ll be grateful that attic space is no longer an issue; unlike the bulky notebook days, it would take centuries, not years, to fill up a carton with the thumb drives on which I now store my journal files. And if my children or anyone else is ever tempted? As long as I’m not here to have to answer their questions about content (“Really, Mom, why did it matter so much that Daddy didn’t empty the dishwasher?”), I’m fine with it. But they should be forewarned: it’s pretty boring stuff. And I promise already that I’m not insulted if they take a look and then decide to forego the rest.