It has been a while since I have posted specifically about the 100 Thing Challenge and the simple living process it advocates. So I thought I would take just a few moments to write up a quick refresher.
Over and over again when I talk to people about the 100 Thing Challenge I tell them the same thing: It’s not about the stuff! The value in living for an extended period of time is not figuring out what things remained on your to-keep list. The value is not marveling at your to-purge list. The value is not even decluttering or creating efficiencies by keeping multi-functional things. Those are some fringe benefits, to be sure. But the most important result of living an extended period of time without much stuff is breaking free from the confining habits of consumerism. Once free from consumerism, there’s a lot of exciting life to be lived.
A while back I came up with the three R’s of the 100 Thing Challenge. Reduce. Refuse. Rejigger. If you are bogged down by stuff, you’ve got to start getting yourself free by reducing the amount of stuff you own. Plain and simple. And if you have gotten yourself bogged down by stuff, then even after you reduce your stuff, you are going to have to refuse to get more stuff, because you are in the habit of getting more stuff and unless you force yourself to refuse more stuff, you are going to end up back where you started, namely, stuck in stuff. So you have to reduce and refuse. So let’s say you do. Now what? Rejigger! Rejigger is just an r-word that is more fun to say that rearrange or reorganize, which is what it means. And what are you going to rejigger? Your closet? Your garage? Well, probably. But more importantly, you are going to start rejiggering your life. You are going to rearrange your life so that your priorities are not centered around stuff.
Reduce. Refuse. Rejigger. And you have to do it in that order. I know of no one who has managed to break free from bad consumer habits by rejiggering without first reducing and refusing. I know of some people who have done a big purge and reduced a lot of their stuff but then didn’t follow through and refuse to get more stuff. Needless to say, those people never got around to rejiggering. 1) Reduce. 2) Refuse. 3) Rejigger. That’s the way you’ve got to do it.
Living simply is so much better than living messy. It’s so much better to think about rejiggering your life around meaningful pursuits instead of dwelling on the next purchase at your favorite store. Three steps to simple living. Not easy ones. But you will never regret living simply.
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The more you believe in it the easier it will be… so the first step toward this lifestyle is usually difficult but once you experience your first taste of it you feel so awesome you can’t imagine living any other way again. Nothing’s easier than living life the way you love to live it
We got sick of dirty dishes piling up. We put most of them away, above the refrigerator, leaving in the more accessible cupboards the bare minimum. (When the extra dishes are less accessible, it’s more convenient to wash one that’s already out than it is to get another, yet they’re there when we have guests and need more.) When a friend suggested this, I was skeptical, but it has worked very, very well, and our kitchen at its messiest is easy to clean, making it easier to have guests over, and less embarrassing when people stop by unexpectedly. In addition, it reduces the need for installing a space-guzzling dishwasher and the dishes take less cupboard space, keeping me more content with my small kitchen. With so many benefits, why didn’t I reduce before?
“Downsizing” hit the economic scene in the 1980′s, so I have actually been reducing since then. I came from a 100+ year old house, so I had past generations (my parents and grandparents), at the same time I dealt with my own generation along with my children. Today, I have my youngest son age 14 still living with me. My ex is retiring soon which might be .. part of my rejiggering, but he has only resentfully allowed me to reduce and refuse haha (his stuff and our marriage/divorce.) Anyway, I have an 8′x12′ cabin at present, my most challenging so far! I expect my son to stay with me, but he is great, he has grown up with my most successful reducing and refusing (he has three older siblings who .. witnessed the process but didnt always see the benefits, the same as their dad). From 4 generation, 3000 sq ft home to living in only 2-3 of those rooms (plus garage) to now 96 sq ft (plus loft).. I’m pursuing Simplicity vigorously. I’m pretty sure this has allowed me to rejigger along nearly 30 years, but I continue to rejigger. I dont think as long as I live, rejiggering is final, as perhaps neither are reducing and refusing. Having come all this way, I’m hanging on that last sentence: But you will never regret living simply.
I just read The 100 Thing Challenge more on a whim than because I was specifically looking for it….found it on a display while browsing at the library. I was surprised that it expressed so much of how I have been feeling for the last several years about our family’s stuff and spending of limited financial resources. I couldn’t put it into words like this but it hit the mark in verbalizing my own feelings in so many ways. Like so many others, we’ve gone through job losses, downsizes, and have had to uproot the family and move across several states twice to start over. The last move we had to pay for ourselves as the company offered virtually no relocation. It was a shock to get that quote from the moving company to move all our stuff. In less than a month, I halved our belongings to get the cost to something affordable. As my husband was already working in the new locale, I went through this process alone with a lot of phone calls back and forth about what to get rid of. Like the book, I had yard sales, gave to charities, friends, used Craigslist, and trashed much too. I did feel “lighter” when we moved, I actually had extra room in the closets. I have tried to be more conscious of accumulation since then but now, 3 years later, I find that once again, all my closets are overflowing, my son’s room is splitting at the seams and I wonder where all the stuff has come from. I feel I’ve been better, but I have succumbed. Like the 100 Thing Challenge, I can’t force it on others either – my husband has 4 grills on the back porch. BBQ’ing is his hobby, I love the stuff that comes off those grills (apparently, they all do different things,) but the porch is starting to look like a Sanford & Sons opening! One of the best things about the book is that I think I can take some of the ideas and principles and start living them again without worrying about being limited to 100 Thing(s) specifically. Right now, that won’t work for us… but it will work to start to educate my son differently about consumerism and start to pare down what we don’t use, wear, or need. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gathered 3 big garbage bags of clothes to donate, a back seat full of books to donate to the library bookstore, and taken 4 copy-paper size boxes to the recycle center. There is still so much to do but I feel like I’ve made a start. I’ll start working my way through overflowing junk drawers in every room of the house and the closets and get there eventually. My son has grown up to the next size of pants, instead of replacing with 10 pair, he got 5, a couple from Once Upon A Child. He wears a uniform for school so why do we need 10, 15+ pairs of shorts. I’ll see how it is to do laundry and keep a couple of those 5 clean before I buy more. He’ll just grow out of them by next summer! I have school uniform clothes with the tag still on them – he probably won’t fit them by school. I can only shake my head at what I’ve done, I need to get busy and improve this state of affairs for my family. I can’t force it on my hubby or son, but I can try to be a better guiding force.