Home is where the heart is
One of the hardest parts of preparing for this tiny home adventure has been paring down. There are lots of items that upon further inspection, we don’t really use all that often. Plenty of little kitchen gadgets, or kids' toys, or bathroom products that have been sitting around collecting dust. Those are the easy things to get rid of. Honestly, it’s freeing to get rid of those things. As humans, we tend to lose sight (literally!) of the items that are not serving a purpose; a decoration on the wall, or a pile of old laundry we shoved into a corner. There is actually a name for this human tendency – unconscious selective attention (check out this article from Scientific American for more info). Hundreds of studies have backed the idea that when your attention is occupied with one thing, people fail to notice the other things right in front of their eyes. Turns out, when I started focusing my attention on paring down, WOW did we have a ton of things that were relatively easy to get rid of because I had failed to notice they had been sitting there for the last year. It felt so freeing to be able to fill giveaway bags quickly and to see my beautiful house emerge from the discarded clutter.
But as I started to hone in on paring down the items I do care about – things I use every day, or that hold special meaning – the chore of paring down quickly became difficult – even painful. For example, when I unearthed the first outfit I wore to high school, I instantly relived the nervousness and excitement of that first day. I recall begging my mother to give me some allowance money early so I could buy the skirt I was coveting; and the fight that ensued with the relative length (or lack thereof) of the skirt (though I can tell you by today’s standards, I looked frumpy giving the fact that the skirt went to my knees). And when I found this outfit in my closet - something I had not worn in at least 10 years - I found myself struggling to let it go. I had forgotten I even had it, and yet, I felt I couldn’t part with it.
My mattress is another example, but for a completely different reason. We have a lovely king mattress with all the deluxe features we could finally afford (yay adulting!). We are moving into the tiny house with a murphy bed that is only a full-size mattress. As some of my family put it “full beds are for kids – what are you doing?!” They are not wrong. The thought of sleeping in such a smaller bed was causing me anxiety. I started to question if this was the right move for us.
The house we are leaving behind is a custom house that my husband and I built. We designed every feature and waited patiently for a year while it was being built. Moving in together and starting a family felt like one of the first real “adult” things we had done in our relationship. I brought both of my kids home from the hospital to this house. I watched them take their first steps here.
For months, I had been doing my best to part with what I could, but the thought of leaving the material things I know (and love!) behind was arduous. I could recall so many wonderful memories when I thought of these items; it felt as though I was paring those memories down too. Here is the great thing about memories – they are not physical. Yes, I love the outfit I first wore to high school, but I don’t need the outfit to remember the way I felt that first day. Yes, I treasure my wonderfully large mattress, and yes, my husband and I will adapt to the extra “snuggling time.” Yes, I love my house, and I don’t need to be in the house physically to recall the skinned knees, the late night feedings, and those early memories of my babies.
“Your memory is the glue that binds your life together; everything you are today is because of your amazing memory. You are a data collecting being, and your memory is where your life is lived.”
“Memories may fade as the years go by but they won’t age a day.”
