Photo by Brian Benfield
[This is the latest installment of “Cobb Cuisine, Culture and Community” by Brian Benefield]
Looking back on our recent holiday adventures around Marietta, I notice a glaringly obvious thing in many of the pictures we took. Lots of more. More food, more drinks, more gifts, more decorations, more of everything. More isn’t necessarily bad, but sometimes, and quite often, less can be more. I’ve been studying this concept of minimalism for many years now, and at first, I had the common misconception that it’s about living with only three outfits to wear and nothing on your kitchen counters. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
My writing professor, Joshua Fields Milburn, is the co-founder of The Minimalists and has published many books on the concept of how living with less can offer peace of mind and make your life more functional on a day-to-day basis. If you were to come to my house, you probably wouldn’t think, hey, this guy is a minimalist. No, because it’s always a process to keep purging the stuff we don’t use often or clothes we haven’t worn in over a year. But, we did take about five thousand trips to Goodwill when we bought our much smaller home in 2018, and while actually doing the process of reducing our things seemed overwhelming, once we moved in, it felt so gratifying to own less stuff to manage.
I still have more clothes than I need, and since I love to cook, I have more rarely used kitchen gadgets than I can count. But now that we have turned a new page into a new year, I will go through many areas of our house and begin the donating process. For me, the key is to do this several times throughout the year, not just because it’s 2024. Pick a room, a set of drawers, or a closet to tackle over trying to take on huge projects, which makes it more feasible to get it done. Everyone wants to reinvent themselves when a new year comes around, and that is a great sentiment, but…
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