Personal Version of Minimalism
Cottage Interior (Interior at Jersey) Artwork by Berthe Morisot
The wooden bowl fell with its own woody whistle and with an additional clanging raucous. The dining area kept on howling when the sanitizer bottle rolled over the other fallen items. I started collecting the bowl, the keys, some still-rolling coins, and the sanitizer bottle. The top of the cabinet had almost every item which perhaps lost the specific locations in the home. That grubby surface had a few spare envelopes, some monthly bills, our daily purses, and a stack of books. That day I was in a hurry so I kept them for some more interactions.
The next day, I met that mess and started clearing things out. After a few minutes, I saw an old postcard peeking out of a book’s pages. That’s my childhood handwriting. I even drew a small plant with crayons. At the bottom of the drawing, I had written,“My plant looks like this.”
There was no address written. I guess I did not intend to send that to anyone. The letter looked like a notepad. I wrote on the top, “Hi” then a big blank space and on the next line, “I won first prize on sports day.” Then again blank and, “Piu gave me extra candies on her b’day. She is my best friend.” Then, “I give water to my plant every day. Bye”
I smiled at my little-self. She would have never thought that her words would woo her elder-self one day. I put that little letter again in the folds of the book. The book was Little Women. I kept on doing my cleaning work. I put the books on the shelves and gave an adorable rub to Little Women.
It was a quick and mesmerising time travel. We often see minimalist organising hacks for a clutter-free lifestyle. And probably at every corner there’s one point, “Eliminate what you don’t need or would never use any more.” Yes, it’s a great hack to clean your house and probably the most satisfying way to give your present and future a clutter-free space. But one thing always strikes me, what if we keep small places for some of our special past memories? Like a postcard, it would not become the mess for the bookshelf. It will be there as a part of my Little Women book. If I go even deeper, then I do have some non-negotiables. I would never be able to discard the ear studs or saree of my grandmother, even if I wore them or not. These things can stay in my wardrobe. The value of things moves us to a place of happiness. Nowadays we are jumping around to find the best future experiences. But the memories never crave that unknown and if sometimes those memories touch us…
Here, I am twiddling with the minimalist principle. I select three sections. That goes on like this one, that I use; the next, that I would pass on; and the last, the things that give me that instant happiness, even if I do not use them. The last part is the big no-no for the minimalism principle. But if it brings happiness, then any principle can be mended for our sake. Any principle, in any era, follows a handsome set of rules. But we need to understand that we have the basic freedom to make the set flexible enough with our own versions. We need to understand what works for us. The next part comes where we decide what we should do to make that ours. I call that transition Ina*. Some ‘isms’ will come in every era and in every era, we should coin that ‘ism’ with a little adoration.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)