It’s hard to believe that it will be 2020 in just over a week. I still feel like the 90’s were 10 years ago. But the decade from 2010–2019 has been one of remarkable change for me. My life today looks virtually nothing like the life I was living on January 1, 2010.
Despite paring down my possessions once or twice a year for at least the past eight years, including through six moves, I still often look around my house and feel like it is just too cluttered. Too many knick-knacks means more to dust, too many surfaces to collect things means more time tidying when preparing for company, and all of this adds up to unnecessary stress. I sometimes look at the white, bright, semi-sparse home decor photos trending on Pinterest or in magazine articles and think about how relaxing it would be to live in a more simply furnished, emptier space.
I’ve written before about my struggles with decluttering and owning too much stuff, and guest poster Courtney has shared her journey toward living with less, along with some great tips and inspiration. The mood to declutter tends to strike me around January, both because of the symbolic fresh start of the new year and because I spend more time at home in the winter months. So when I was invited to join a decluttering Facebook group and shortly thereafter heard of a 30-day decluttering challenge originally proposed by the Minimalists, I was motivated to once again assess my belongings and get rid of what wasn’t serving me.
“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
—Mother Teresa
Two events have affected me more than any others in my life. The first was becoming pregnant, feeling a living being developing inside me, and beginning to transition into the role of mother. The second was losing a parent. I experienced both in 2017.
The beginning of a new year is a good time to reevaluate our priorities. Setting New Year’s resolutions is one way to define our goals, but it can be helpful to do some deeper thinking about what’s important to us and what we want our lives to look like.
When I was in my mid-twenties, trying to find myself and feeling some existential angst, I decided to write a personal mission statement. I thought about what I really valued and about the qualities exhibited by the people with whom I most enjoyed spending time. I considered how I wanted to be perceived and what I could bring to the people with whom I interacted. I crafted a brief manifesto of sorts, about ten sentences long, which is longer than a traditional organizational mission statement. What I wrote could probably be better described as a combination mission, vision, and values statement. I won’t include the whole thing here, but it began by stating that “I value compassion, fairness, and forgiveness,” and it ended with the following sentence: “I want to better the lives of the people around me by comforting them in times of need, lifting their spirits, and inspiring them to do the things they are meant to do.”