discovering minimalism, pt 3

So we're fast-forwarding a lot this time. More than a year has passed since I was having daily mindful moments by the riverside in Kandersteg. It's 9 PM on Sunday, August 18th 2019. I'm 30,000 feet above Glasgow in a plane that's just started its descent toward the runway.

The past year of my life had been a very mixed bag, the Bertie Bots Every Flavour Beans of life experiences. I'd lived through the good, the bad and the indifferent. With so much occupying my mind, my slow-growth journey had been stunted for a time. I went through another break-up, my worst and most savage yet! And so too did my parents just a couple of months later. A shit show for everyone involved, as I'm sure you can imagine. And so after 21-years of relative stability, I was suddenly thrown into a whole world of uncertainty. Dad moved out, mum drifted and my sister and I were at a cross-roads, mere children of the cross-fire. I lasted a month at home, sticking it out until I was finally able to bail.

By way of complete chance, I had just enough in savings to make a deposit on a one-bedroom flat in my home town. I shopped around a few shit-holes and dives before I stumbled on a catch, just the right size and handy for the train station. It was the perfect space for my life at the time and frankly, I couldn't afford myself the luxury of forward planning, of accounting for growth. People tend to sneer at one-bedroom places but the reality was it served a purpose. When faced with the very real possibility of sofa surfing, anything else is preferable. So I put my short-term needs before my long-term wants, made an offer that was quickly accepted and took out a mortgage. I moved in a month later.

Moving day when you aren't quite old enough to hire a van on your own is awkward! Oh yeah, you are old enough to be trusted to be out on your own with a big-ass mortgage, but hire a Transit van for a day... no chance! So my dad hired and drove the van for me, with my 21-years worth of material accumulations in the back cab. I actually threw out quite a lot of things before I moved, things I knew I didn't need anymore and even some stuff that I never needed in the first place. I brought most of my clothes and shoes, of which I had many, a few pieces of furniture, plus odds and ends that I'd kept or picked up in the final days before the move. A reading lamp for my bedside cabinet, a couple of mugs, plates and bowls - most of which I inherited. We had an abundance of crockery at home. We used to laugh that the only time we'd ever use all the plates was at a family Christmas dinner. I had some toiletries, of course, my desk for work and a shoe rack by the door. And don't forget the TV stand, complete with the TV itself. There were a few framed photos dotted around the place, most of which still hang here today. But save these things, I had little to my name. 

After a long day of unpacking boxes, filling, emptying and refilling cupboards, I was done-in. Fridge empty, I ordered pizza. The living room was still mostly empty and echoing, save a hand-me-down two-seater leather sofa at one end of the room and my TV at another. I'd pestered my parents for years about that sofa, about how it went unused in the conservatory and that it could go in my room. But now that they had finally said 'yes, fine, someone may as well use it,' it somehow didn't look right. Perhaps it was the incompleteness of it all, but it simply didn't feel homely. So I spent the first night in my new home sat cross-legged on my bed surfing the DFS website with one hand and eating pizza straight from the box with the other. The block, the whole street in fact, was deadly silent. I remember sitting there, chomping down on a veggie pizza and asking myself the most dangerous question there is - what else do I need?

It's dangerous in that, if we try hard enough, we can justify pretty much anything to ourselves. One of the guys from the office spoke for ages about taking out a line of credit to buy a Rolex because "it would be an investment." He was eventually convinced otherwise, thank god, and not just because the Rolex is the watch of choice for all the world's arses. A £10,000 deposit to an investment account will bear greater fruits than a second hand Rolex ever will! The reality was that he just wanted the watch and was willing to use any means he could to talk himself into it. 

I was exactly the same, although perhaps to a lesser extreme. If I'm honest with myself, besides food in the fridge (which I'd later sort the next day) I already had everything I needed. I had the basics. Sure, much of it wasn't aesthetically pleasing, but it was a liveable home. Yet despite this, I still went to Ikea and filled an entire shopping cart with shit I didn't need. Honestly, I can't remember what any of that was. Looking back I find it curious, actually ludicrous, that I did this. From my experiences over the past few years, I was becoming more and more aware of what actually makes me happy, which things I really do need, versus the things I wanted just because. I was sat in the living room of my family home one day, just weeks before I was due to move out, when I first watched a documentary that would forever change my world view. It was a documentary that put a word in my head that perfectly described the way I'd been feeling since I was in London. The word was Minimalism and the documentary was called A Documentary About The Important Things. 

It was strange. The whole thing cast my mind back to when I was 10-years-old, or so. I was starting to acknowledge by this point that I felt so very different from the other boys in school, until one day someone called me a name. I had no idea what it meant and I certainly wasn't about to ask, so later that day I rushed home to Google it. Or perhaps it was Yahoo back then, who knows. The word was gay - and suddenly things started to make sense.

History had repeated itself in near-perfect fashion. At 21 I had eased another torment, another gut feeling that I was being pulled in an indeterminate direction with no word in my vocabulary to describe it. After fighting an undercurrent for so long, minimalism suddenly seemed like the perfect solution. 

So in the next few weeks and months that followed, I made it a goal of mine to see how much I could go without. I had the perfect opportunity to try it - even if it didn't work out. Living in a new place, I think the first few months are the most important. It's on those few months of getting yourself going that things in your life are most in flux, when anything can suddenly change with you meaning it to, or even without you noticing. I'm not saying you'll become a completely different person by any means, but small things do change over time as you start to adopt different ways of doing things. 

From day one, I went full veggie there and then. I was brought up on a diet of chicken and fish, so I wasn't a huge meat eater anyway, but I wasn't given much utility over my evening meals when I lived at home. I was very much expected to eat what was put down to me. But things were suddenly different. I was free to decide these things for myself, nobody to ask permission from.

I became the house-proud type, the type that would sweep the floors every day, put things back where they belonged, wash dishes multiple times per day, the whole shooting match. Much of this was born out of necessity of course. In a space so small, 56 square meters to be exact, you need to be pathologically clean and tidy or you'll feel like you have no room to breathe. I was constantly washing dishes because I had but enough for one meal at a time! But I did at least start building good habits and a healthy obsession with cleanliness - at least in my opinion. Ryan calls it OCD!

Of course, the easiest way to avoid a cluttered home that needs organising all the time, is to carefully control what comes through the door and to constantly review the belongings that make it past the threshold. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, known collectively as The Minimalists, have a simple rule for this: does object A serve a purpose or bring you joy? I spent months asking myself this question, over and over again, as I paired down my possessions. Identifying the items that no longer fitted into my definition of life and selling, donating or throwing it away - and it worked. I ditched much of the Ikea riff-raff that I'd only bought recently, realising it was never what I truly wanted. I realised that I actually owned a lot of things that I wasn't getting any value from, and that removing not just the items themselves, but the temptation for more items, removes that barrier of ephemeral pleasure that stands between you and what you really want.

At the time, I wanted to travel. Before my parents split up, before I moved out and my financial commitments and burdens increased ten-fold, I committed to the biggest and most expensive trip of my life. Lauryn and I were going Interrailing for a whole month, give or take a few days. A once-in-a-lifetime trip to see the world, how could a 21-year-old turn that opportunity down? But with everything that had happened I was very worried that my sudden swerve in circumstances and cliff-edge plummet of disposable income would impact my ability to go. It would have been proper shit. We'd been planning it for nearly a year and by now the trip was just a couple of months away. I had to act fast to either say "Yes, I can still make it," or "Abort, let's rebook for next year." The earlier you cancel the better chance you stand of getting most of your money back.

So I opened the Notes app on my phone and I started the very first version of what I now call my Need, Want, Like analysis. On this note I trimmed the fat from my lifestyle, making more use of public transport, which had a knock-on affect to car insurance, parking and petrol costs, as well as dramatically cutting back on nights out and random clickbait spending on Amazon. I even stopped carrying my credit card for a while too, just until I could learn to bloody trust myself again! It felt horrible at the time, like I was depriving myself of comforts I'd become accustomed to, but the reality was that it worked. The trip cost me nearly £3k all-in and I was able to cover the lot in cash because of my aggressive savings plan. This tactic would then snowball toward hitting my next financial goals.

As I started packing for our Interrail trip, a whopping* two days before we were due to leave, I made a decision. I bought a light-weight bag and set myself the goal of travelling Europe for the whole month with only what I could fit in this 45-litre carry-on bag, the type that can fit in the overhead compartment of a plane. I actually bought the bag weeks ago but wasn't entirely sure it was an achievable goal. It was only as I sat down to pack that I realised yeah, I'm pretty sure I can do this. A bomber jacket, five tee-shirts, one pair of jeans, three pairs of shorts, a dress shirt, one hoody, seven pairs of underwear and socks, two pairs of shoes and a quick-dry towel, plus electronics like my phone, cable and a portable charger. I also took a small folder with pre-printed boarding passes and vouchers that didn't have a mobile-compatible equivalent. Yep, believe it or not there are still airlines and train companies out there that don't have e-tickets for the Apple and Android Wallet apps! But that was pretty much it. Lauryn took a lot more than that of course. You can read about that on the post Lucky.

And off we went. Off to sample the best latte's Europe has to offer! Off to The Breakfast Club in London, to museums, chip shops and waffle stands in Belgium, to Checkpoint Charlie, The Berlin Wall and cocktails at the TV Tower (and Tressor of course, for the craziest night out of my life) in Germany. And to Prague to eat scrambled eggs on croissants, to Poland for a pub crawl we inevitably didn't finish and to really buzz off statues in Vienna. Then on to shaking our shammy at my first ever festival, at one of europe's largest in Budapest, no less! Followed by chill walks and eggs florentine in beautiful Ljubljana, Europe's hidden gem. Then lastly to Amsterdam to sample joint rips and boat trips and more stroopwafels than should be legal. 23 days of absolute carnage, summarised! 

Until eventually we find ourselves here, sat with our ears popping on a KLM flight that's minutes away from touch-down in Glasgow. Still inebriated from the night before, I was unusually calm during our bumpy descent. Lauryn not so much, to say the least! Although to be fair, some of the bumps and bangs would make you swear we were crossing the Kessel Run in an Astra!

I had managed to complete my little self-set challenge to travel light. Sure, I picked up a few items along the way, which was inevitable. And sure, the whole idea of travelling with all my luggage in a bag that fits in an over-head locker didn't really work out either. The bag was so bloody heavy that it exceeded the weight limit on both flights we took, so I ended up having to pay extra to book it into the hold. But that was just bad planning for a technicality I hadn't really thought about. As far as I was concerned, the experiment was still a success. I traveled with everything I needed in a small bag and found that it in no way tainted my experience. Quite the opposite in fact. I felt alive, free from the usual trappings of modern life, liberated from stuff.

~ Aedan.