Five Minute Friday: Lose

This week the topic for the Five Minute Friday link-up post is Lose. What is a link-up? Essentially a link-up is when you join other bloggers and write on a similar topic. You share your blog posts with one another and begin conversations via a host site. You can head over to Kate Motaung’s page to check out other entries from inspired bloggers. Here’s my five minutes of uninterrupted, unedited writing on this week’s topic:

Early this spring my husband and I began our annual preparations for summer by cleaning out the house. This year during this cleaning we were overtaken by the amount of “things” we have accumulated in five years of marriage. Our kitchen cabinets were overflowing, closets were unable to close, and our two car garage had enough room to squeeze in one car at best. We felt like we were drowning in a sea of stuff. And most of that stuff was unused and just taking up space.

Refusing to let clutter take over our lives we decided to donate, throw out, and recycle so many of our things. We began the process of stripping our wardrobes of clothes we hadn’t worn in a while. My amazing husband took on the garage nearly by himself, and we refused to purchase things for our kitchen that could only serve one purpose.

Little did we know at the time that minimalism has been catching on in a big way.

Minimalism is the act of becoming content with minimal possessions in order to spend less time cleaning or focusing on accumulating objects. Well, that’s my definition anyway.

After discussions about buying less and investing more in others my husband and I found the website Becoming Minimalist which goes along with many of our discussions. We like how this website gives practical reasons and steps to implement minimalism in our household. It has inspired us to lose the “things” that take up so much of our time and replace them with memory making. Not only is this a wise decision when it comes to our finances, but also when it comes to alleviating our schedules. We have more time for each other because we aren’t spending all of our time chasing things or keeping them clean.

I have already taken up my five minutes. I will write more in the future about our acts of minimalism.