00014: Five Things

Day 5, five items

Today marks the fifth day of my 30-day Minimalism Game and the process is much harder than I thought. In one of their podcast, “The Minimalists” Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus talked about how around day seven things start to get difficult. For me, day five became difficult. It isn’t that I don’t have stuff, believe me I do, it is that I just don’t want to get rid of stuff for the sake of getting rid of it. Does that make sense?

I want to get rid of my books but libraries ask what type of books are they to see if they fit within their services. I want to get rid of CDs and DVDs but I don’t just want to throw them all away. And this means I need to do research about the best way to get them off my hands. Luckily, I’m learning but it is very hard to simply get rid of stuff if one doesn’t just want to throw everything away.

The image above shows the five items for today. In reality, there are more than five items there. There are, for example, three different photo frames and the green bag is filled with other recycling bags that were given to me by someone. The reason why I’m grouping things is because I have a lot of stuff and if I count each frame as one item, for example, I feel I’m cheating. Also, my desire to truly declutter is in full force at the moment so I’m taking advantage of such energy. I mean, less is now.

I will continue grouping certain items together but at some point they will be counted as individual items, books, for example. I cannot just get rid of say, 20 books and call that action as one item. I’m crazy but I’m not insane. At least not yet.

As I write this, I keep thinking that if I have a difficult time doing day five, I wonder what is going to happen on day 10, day 15, day 20, day 25, and day 30. I cannot even imagine what I am going to go through. I’ll find out soon enough. #carlosmanuelspeaksthetruth