Letting Go

As I shared with you on April Fool’s Day, we are preparing for our full-time adventures in our fifth wheel as we meander around the southwest and beyond. And for those of my friends who really believed it was an April Fool’s Day joke, I appreciate you thinking I would actually go to this elaborate of a prank. However, it’s all true.

With our plans only a few weeks away, we recently completed our second and final garage sale. Part of the process of sizing down from a 2,000+ square foot house to living in less than 400 square feet is getting rid of stuff.  Dan and I have been married for nearly 17 years so, between the two of us, we’ve accumulated a lot of said stuff and a majority of it has no sentimental value. Sadly, while this is our first move to tiny house living, it’s not our first move into a new home. You would have thought we’d have learned to stop buying things over more than a decade and a half, but apparently we learned nothing.

I now realize in going through this process, and it IS a process, the larger the home, the more crap you want to pile in it. And in the big scheme of things, it really is crap. Sorry to hurt your feelings, retail giants. Living as minimalist will need to be learned quickly in the RV as there’s just so much space and weight it can take. Fortunately, my Nikon cameras should be able to capture a great deal of “things” we can enjoy in an album rather than collecting dust on a shelf somewhere.

Both of us have lost sleep over the past few weeks in determining what should stay, what should go, what should sell, and what should be donated to charity. If we truly thought about how much we spent on all these things we just “had” to have, we’d drive ourselves insane. We’re almost there without that kind of thinking. So the small junk is now gone and the big stuff is in the process of being gone. That said we had to laugh when we realized we were losing sleep over a couch, a bed, and a refrigerator. Really? All things considered, things are pretty good. Queen Elsa gave good advice in Frozen, when she sang “let it go.”  Done!