Would you believe that cleaning a closet could change your life? At least, it changed mine. My life became more simple, I made space, and I realized that the less I have, the less I need. And I feel free.
What does it mean to have a moderate lifestyle? It means there is no excesses in anything. Maybe you can find this obvious and easy to do, but for me, it wasn’t easy at all at the beginning. I remember the days when I was working in a very good company and earning more than enough, so I could spend money without worries. Then, after a while, my credit card started to accumulate the bills from different purchases in different months. I could still pay the bills, yet at some point, I started to ask myself: “When did I buy this? I never used it!” or “Wow, this costs so much! It was a bad quality!” or “Look, how much I spent on Christmas!”
One simple rule
This happened often – I bought things just to buy something, because I was feeling the need to buy, just to follow the trend of the moment. In those days, I remember I felt very good buying presents or nice things, but I never asked myself if I needed those things or if my gifts were meaningful or not. So, when talking about moderate lifestyle, I mean to be aware of what I need for real.
One rule that helped me realize this was: “If I didn’t use something for 6 months, I would never use it.” You can apply this to everything: clothes, shoes, jewelry, books. After a while, I shortened the 6 months to 3 months, and then – 1 month.
After 6 months of not using many things, I decided to give them to charity. There are so many people that can use what I wasn’t using and mostly I didn’t value at all. After this practice, I reduced my expenditure to 60%, so I saved money and time; time that would have been spent on all these decisions – will I use it or not? Should I buy it? What colour or shape should I buy? On which occasion will I use the item? Moreover, I realized that I didn’t need so many things! Do you ever think about this? Do we really need all the things we own? No, I think we don’t need all those things and that is really liberating.
Clean in – Clean out
I applied this rule to pretty much everything, starting with my closet, my shoes, my hair products, my make-up, my kitchen utensils, the food that I ate until I went to my mind by starting to recognize what kind of thoughts I want. How could we do this? How could we can “clean” and make more “space” in our lives? In my case, it was through meditation. Thanks to meditation we can clean our mind, and with this clear mind it will be easier to recognize what we really need and what we don’t need. If you want to know more about how you can start to meditate, click here.
Having a moderate lifestyle is liberating, it makes you feel free of having to worry about space, order, and cleanliness. Creating more space makes everything simple. So go to your closet and look for all those things you never used in the past year and give them to someone who needs them! You will feel so good because that jacket you didn’t use the past year is being used for someone else to protect them from cold, or those shoes protecting someone else’s feet and our environment saying “thank you” for not doing more waste!
For me, this was the first step to make space for other areas in my life, like my health. For example, now I have space for sport pants and sneakers to run. So, what about every time you want to buy something new, you ask yourself: do I need it?
To develop a meditation practice yourself, you can try the online self-development program, or join the 7 day Peace Revolution online course.