I found minimalism more than ten years ago, back when it was still a slightly eccentric thing to be interested in — before the beige linen photoshoots, before it became a look you could buy.
It started, as these things do, quietly. Somewhere around the time my inbox found Joshua Becker’s blog, Becoming Minimalist. He’d had his famous moment cleaning out his garage — a whole Saturday sacrificed to sorting stuff while his young son waited to play — and a neighbour’s passing comment cracked something open: maybe you don’t need to own all this. He wrote about it plainly, without drama, and I remember reading and feeling something in me exhale. Here was a man saying that a home wasn’t a container to be filled, and that everything you own takes a small payment of your attention, forever, whether you notice the debits or not. At the time I could really relate as I had small children.
Then came Courtney Carver, and Be More with Less, and Project 333 — the experiment of dressing with just 33 items for three months. She’d simplified her life after an MS diagnosis forced the question most of us keep successfully avoiding: what is all this for? I managed a few Project 33 quarters, and the idea rearranged me. I stood in front of my overfull wardrobe and understood, properly, that it wasn’t abundance I was looking at. It was decisions. Hundreds of small deferred decisions, hanging there, demanding to be made every single morning before coffee.
That’s what those early writers gave me — not a style, but a lens. Minimalism was never about the white walls. It was about noticing the true cost of things: the tidying, the storing, the insuring, the stepping-over, the low hum of visual noise that a full house plays all day. Once you see that cost, you can’t unsee it. Every object becomes a tiny employee, and you’re suddenly aware you’ve been running a very large company with no salary and a lot of time wasted.
Ten years on, I hold it all more loosely. I still own too many books and I regret nothing. I still like the “one in, one out” minimalist idea – where for everything I bring into our home, one thing has to leave (only applied to objects). Now my version of minimalism has soft edges — it makes room for the beautiful, the sentimental, the frankly unjustifiable lemon-shaped jug. But the question those two planted has never left the house: does this thing earn its keep — in space, in attention, in life?
Most things don’t. The ones that do get to stay, and are loved better for the space around them.
That was the whole revolution, really. Not less for its own sake. Less, so the good things could finally be seen.
Yours, from a slightly emptier room —
Genevieve