To care or not to care, the key to minimalism?
I keep wondering, what makes people care and why don’t people care about certain things. This came to mind while changing the oil on my motorcycle. A simple rule my father taught me was “you can borrow anything from me, as long as you put it back where you found it, and in the same state or better.” Applying this rule I used his tools, cleaned them from any oily fingerprint and put them back exactly where I found them. To me this comes naturally, it’s just something you do. You take care when using something and you take care not to make a mess out of it. It also means cleaning up after yourself.
Here another example comes to mind. I’ve seen my fair share of student dorms and I keep being amazed at the mess some people make, especially clothing and dirty dishes. Once used it’s “discarded” somewhere in the dorm and perhaps once a month things get cleaned up. Why is that? isn’t it just about the same amount of work to throw your dirty clothing directly into the laundry hamper? A flick of the wrist in stead of just opening a hand and it’s less clutter.
You can actually see this in all of society, the mass consumerism and the rapid discard of anything not immediately functional anymore. Once something has served it’s purpose it’s tossed aside, not even a second thought goes into caring where it’s going to end up.
I’m sorry for ranting a bit but I wonder, is it normal to cast things aside when they have served their function? Or is it normal to take care in disposing of them properly? ….if taking care of proper disposal is the norm, how come there is so much garbage in the streets and so many dirty socks on the floor?
Once you have the 100 items challenge done, you simply can’t be careless about your things can you? Is this the key to caring perhaps? To not have so much stuff you don’t really know what to do with it all. To have so little stuff that everything is valuable. I think caring and minimalism go hand in hand, they just have to.
What do you think?
