Minimal Lifestyle.

Hello Everyone, it is Emi. 🙂

In this second post, I would like to talk about mentalities of essentialism.

When we failed to address the philosophy behind it, attempts to decluttering often can be abandoned and not be completed. This is because lack of questioning… the very important part of self evaluation!

Many minimalists or essentialists ask themselves constantly…

“What things I can get rid of?”

“What is in my way for me to enjoy things?”

“What is slowing me down to be productive?”

From the third eyes, essentialist or minimalist may seem as extreme people who likes to dump things in a haste, unsociable, not sentimental, quick to judge… (often it can be true. But why is that anybody’s business? We can talk about this in another post…!) What they are actually doing is eliminating any small decisions and actions that hinders or slow them down in only focusing on things that matters to them.

So put more simply… the question is:

“What not to do?”

So… yes, it is all about the actions! There are accumulative things we see, touch, and use to get on to daily life, and when there are too many unnecessary things… naturally we feel overwhelmed and unfulfilling despite all the effort. (For example: Taking forever to choose outfit to go out… have so many kitchen tools but cooking in not efficient ways…home office has some mess, can not concentrate…) Things and tools are there for help us, but when there are too many… they can be burden and distraction.

I would like to ask you to imagine this following scenario:

• You are going on a vacation alone! 😌🏝️
• It is an immediate decision, you jumped on it. ✈️
• So…you only have limited, and essential things with you. 👜😎
• You do not have a lot of plan. You just decide what to do as you goes with your journey. 🗺️✨

Generally speaking, maybe there are two types of reaction:

1. You feel free! 🙌There are unlimited possibilities! I imagine a lot of us have experienced such excitement when going for travel. Leaving your usual life space, work and things that trouble you behind… get to be a “different version of me” when you are in an exotic place.
2. You feel uneasy.😬 You might be kinds of person likes to have a well prepared plan. You feel nervous and feel like you are being irresponsible to abandon something at your usual life? Or, maybe thinking there are so much things to deal with…such as book for flight, finding hotel…over packaging luggage because do not want the the inconvenience of forgetting something… and all that is just not worth it!

…either way, I believe most of us like the idea of

being a FREE BIRD! 🦜

…have no restrictive burden, always feels light and mobile

to jump on exciting opportunities…! 🪽

Travelling does that for us! It is healthy to feel that once in a while.

But…why not to live that in your everyday, daily life?

We will start from small things to achieve that. Let’s talk about…

📍Defining function of your life space.

This involve questioning “what do I do here?” “What feeling I want to have here?” “What I want to achieve here?” By doing this over and over again, we will naturally see what is excessive things that is not helping the goals you have.

To give examples from some of my home picture I uploaded above… (it is a slideshow ⇧) these space have limited functions as the following:

• 🌛Bedroom: only for sleeping.
• 🍳Kitchen: have limited cookware on the bench.
• 🔑Doorway: just shoes and keys
• 🌱Balcony: BBQ grill (my partner loves it!) and sometime drying clothes.
• ☕️Living room: only for relaxing. E.g.: drinking tea, aroma diffusing…
• 🚿Bathroom: selected items on the reach, no additional “stocks” of products.
• 🍴Dining table: just for eating, and working on laptop for me.

In the next post, I am planning to start talking about one of the living space…and what kinds of steps we worked toward to “essentialise” them to make sense for our lifestyle.

How about… Wardrobe or bathroom?! We will see! 😁

I am excited for being here next week… bye bye for now~! 🦅