The past three months have found me living a spartan life. An empty living, dining, kitchen, master bedroom and second bedroom in the home I am coming to know again. Only the guest room is furnished.
These last few months in western North Carolina have been anything but empty. The only things I am truly missing is 'stuff.' I wonder how I - why I...needed it in the first place. Like so many others I fell into the consumer world. Then I emptied. I like it this way.
Of course, it will be nice to have something to sit upon. A comfy sectional, a place to store the myriad of paperwork our society seems to need. Ownership, cover yer butt and all documentation. You know what I mean. How did it ever get so complicated? Most of us need file cabinets, folders, calculators just to manage the daily march of paperwork into our homes. It was not that way fifty years ago and I lived well enough.
Even with the paperwork, my life has simplified. I buy less, eat less, want less. What I want...what I have now is a mindful lifestyle. It doesn't require busyness, or a feeling of needing to be 'productive' like western society defines it. It means I live more gently, use little, help others, tune in to what really matters.
At the end of one's life no one ever discusses the money they made, the stuff they have accumulated. They remember they didn't spend enough time with family and those dear to them.
When the moving truck arrives in April it will be bittersweet. Soon I will inventory the stuff coming into my sanctuary. What to keep, what to shed. For our exterior world has a lot to say about our internal one.
Home. Where my story begins. Again.
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