"Minimalism is not the lack of what you need, its simply the perfect amount of what you need", A balance between what you want and what you need.
Mornings were getting difficult until I realized why. We had returned from our trip to Mumbai and I had shopped as usual. There were things all over our home and I wasn’t feeling too great about it, however had very little time to set the home up until the weekend arrived.
Over the weekend, I along with my husband and two children got on a cleaning spree to simplify our life. I had spent most of my life feeling overwhelmed with the unwanted clutter of clothes, footwear, accessories, and souvenirs I had collected over the time,but now I truly wanted to put an end to all this and decided to start my journey of mindful shopping. An important factor here was to work on the urge of shopping, it was not easy to get discouraged and drop everything we had been building, but this time we didn’t give up. There were times when the online shopping cart piled up yet I didn’t click the submit button to place the order and those were such accomplishments. I was yet not sure how to go about until I decided to do it step by step.
· First I decided to stop my impulse shopping and only to shop what was needed, this was tricky, and sometimes to distinguish between want with need was the challenge.Slowly we learned to identify what want was and what we needed
· Second I created a shopping list that stayed on the kitchen board and all of us could list whatever we needed against our names throughout the week. We sat down together 1 day prior the day of shopping to re-look at the items listed and asked ourselves did we really need the items and realized we didn’t want more than half of them, this way we struck off many items listed and came to a smaller list
· Third, we reduced our trips to the supermarket and procured most of our needs locally
· I removed all online shopping apps except a couple of them for necessities.
It took over 2-3 months to keep the shopping impulses at bay, but now we are much more aligned to our objective of only shopping what we need, and whilst all this we feel less overwhelmed and have successfully created more space at home.
This journey of mindful shopping not only made me conscious of what I buy but also I have started to refuse anything that can be avoided and find an alternative instead.I now carry my small bag with a hand towel, bottle of water, a plate, a collapsible mug, spoon & fork whenever I am outside for more than 3-4 hrs.
A minimalist lifestyle is the first step to Sustainable living.
To join our cause of Sustainable Living and to know more about our learning initiatives, please reach us at oes@organo.co.in or Visit: https://www.organoetschool.co.in/
