Since my last post titled “A Quiet Life” apparently resonated with so many of you, I was inspired to follow it with a similarly themed one here. And as I was pondering a title I was reminded of the popular campaign for the once-revolutionary Volkswagen Beetle, which debuted with the catchy slogan of “Think Small” [as pictured above].
As I mentioned in the last post, “don’t let words like quiet and ordinary steer you away from living a meaningful life.” And the word small is another one of those that people tend to belittle, if you’ll pardon the pun. But upon closer reflection, I have come to realize that it may really describe the lifestyle of minimalism perfectly.
For Linda and I, the journey of living large with less literally started with thinking small, as we asked ourselves, “How little can we actually learn to live with?” From there we engaged the process of paring our possessions down to the point that we were able to move here to Maine [five years ago today] with all our stuff packed into a Nissan Rogue.
As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes in his memoir, Things a Little Bird Told Me, “People think of constraint as giving something up instead of gaining something…Embrace constraint. What you get in return is the art and craft of editing your own life.” And I might add that what you end up with is a curated life of quality instead of a cluttered one of quantity.
Whether or not you and yours ever aspire to radically downsize your lives at least be willing to consider how you might lessen the loads of stuff you own in order to live more freely and lightly. I venture to say that once you try to simplify your life even a little you will quickly discover that thinking small can pay large dividends for you and your loved ones.