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A Minimalist Life


I recently listened to a TED Radio Hour podcast entitled Slowing Down. Various guests discussed the benefit of simplifying our lives, even procrastinating, to encourage more personal creativity and satisfaction. If interested, you may find the talk by Googling Slowing Down: TED Radio Hour: NPR.
The talk prompted me to think about an essay I wrote in 2014, A Minimalist Life, shortly after we moved into our condo while waiting for our house to sell. During that nine-month wait, we left almost all of our furniture in the sale-house to make it more visually appealing to potential buyers. The essay appears below.

A Minimalist Life

Friends look at us through pitying eyes. “Are you getting situated in the condo?” Amid sideways glances, they skirt a question they hunger to ask: “Have you sold the house yet?” When finally spoken, the inquiry triggers discomfort in our gut. Should we admit we haven’t sold and again lowered the asking price? Or should we cite our latest count of showings and boast about the number of hits received by our online listing?
Whatever we say isn’t enough, and their eyes tighten, signaling social unease. They're troubled by the idea of retired friends sleeping on futons on the floor in an empty building, and they squirm as we mention it. When invited in, they scrutinize our blank walls like anthropologists studying third-world aboriginals.
Yes, we are odd; we live in a condominium. They struggle with the word; it evokes negative connotations—they think it’s not quite a real house, and we are almost kin to the unwashed who rent apartments without garages. And then they experience the empty rooms’ cavernous echo.
They suspect we suffer furniture separation anxiety, imagining we check our email hourly for realtor updates. Not so. We are in our fifth month of condo life—it’s true we wait for a sale—yet we find the echo chamber pleases us more each day. Instead of fretting the house won’t sell, we worry it will, and we’ll be forced to give up our minimalist simplicity, only to suffocate beneath the weight of rugs, ceramics, and bookcases.
A recently purchased dining room rug languishes in the basement. We resist cleaning it and laying it down. Why? We fear the loss of freedom, loss of soothing emptiness. Chairs will no longer slide beneath the dining room table unhindered. Now, we seat ourselves with effortless movement, experiencing a kinesthetic thrill as the chair feet glide smoothly on clean felt pads. The motion is silent and sensuous on slick hardwood, sanded and varnished to its easily dusted finish.
That rolled-up rug in the basement rug could trigger the destruction of our quiet and simple lives. Brought upstairs, it could set in motion a hunger for more—more rugs, more wall hangings, more furniture. We’ll lose the rhythmic back-and-forth enjoyment of therapeutic dust-moppery and gain the torture of vacuuming, with that infernal machine’s twisting snake of a hose kinking and tripping underfoot. Other decorating requirements will loom in our minds: paintings to place, position, hang and align—always fretting color, composition, grouping; slumping frames to realign and dust; unused nails to pull; holes to putty and paint; every frame bringing pain.
In bedrooms, dressers must be purchased, lugged, placed, moved and moved again until they find their perfect spot. Clothes now locatable by our mental GPS will hide in unlabeled drawers. No mucking about in unlabeled dresser drawers; everything is out in the open, so easily visible. I will be a sad man, standing in the closet looking at the empty wire shelves where I now so easily find my white socks, black socks, colored socks, briefs, undershirts, T-shirts, pullovers, and cargo shorts.
For now we savor the simple life. Music plays somewhere in the house, and we enjoy the repetition of favorite notes, as they echo among the empty rooms.
The End
© Richard Schram 2014, 2017

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