By
During a recent trip to the grocery,
I ran into a woman who had
lost
everything
in the LA fires last January.
As soon as she recognized “the minimalist guy,”
she approached me in the parking lot:
“I need to tell you everything…
about losing everything.”
“I spent years acquiring everything I wanted—
the perfect house, the perfect furniture,
the perfect things…
and yet I was perfectly unhappy.”
Then: the flames imperfected her life.
Every thing was rubble in just a few hours.
She confessed there were indeed a few things she missed,
mostly practical items of convenience and comfort—
those broken-in boots, that high-performance blender.
However, she was shocked to admit—
almost ashamed to acknowledge—
that she didn’t miss most of her
so-called sentimental items.
“Not really.”
If anything, the conflagration had
unburdened her from her attachments:
“I’d meant to sort through all that stuff for years,
but I’d always put it off.”
Certainly we’ve all uttered the same ol’
Procrastinator’s Motto:
“I’ll get to that someday.”
Of course someday never arrives.
And the clutter mounts.
But someday did actually arrive for this woman.
According to her, the firestorm
forced her to confront her misguided accumulation—
everything
all at once.
The initial shock and pain and fear
was soon replaced
by newfound freedom.
Turns out…
She was relieved, not bereaved.
In time, she would replace the useful things—
cookware, utensils, electronics, bedding.
But she also replaced the chaos of the clutter
with spaciousness and peace and self-respect.
Sure, her favorite shirt was now a pile of ash.
“But this is my new favorite shirt,” she said,
joyfully gripping the gray sweater on her torso.
Sure, the jewelry she had inherited was now scrap metal.
“But I never wore that gaudy stuff anyway!” she said,
smiling and tapping on her freckled empty wrist.
Sure, the dusty photos in the attic were now just a memory.
“But when was the last time I even looked at those pictures?”
You see, her false attachment to clothes and jewelry and photos was exposed as a mere story—a story she had wrapped around her things.
Then, when everything spontaneously combusted, she quickly developed a visceral understanding of a profound truth:
There are no sentimental items—
only sentimental people.
By letting go of the stories,
she was finally able to let go
of the things.
For more on this topic, Ryan and I recorded a conversation about our favorite minimalist tool: the Spontaneous Combustion Rule.
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