After each digging session, Andy collected the pieces of dirt and concrete and filled his pockets, concealing the evidence of his planned escape. The flashback shows him discretely emptying his pockets in the prison yard each day.
It took the fictitious Andy Dufresne, played by a young Tim Robbins, 19 years to tunnel his way out of prison by removing the barrier little by little.
I’ve found Andy’s process an apt metaphor for minimalism, especially my own life as I prepare to downsize from 20 years in the same home. It’s a prison of sorts, a home that’s been too big for too long for our family of four. I shudder to think how much more time and money we’d have now and over the last two decades by living smaller and investing more.
If the cost of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it, then my wife and I traded much of our thirties and forties paying for and maintaining a large home. There are perhaps three reasons for having a big home – huge family, many houseguests, lots of entertaining – and we can’t justify it on any of those grounds.
It’s not just the initial cost of the home in 1999, which was significant, but also the ongoing expense in terms of taxes and insurance, to say nothing of the time maintaining the home and a huge yard. In recent years, it seems we’ve welcomed more contractors and repairmen into the home than guests and family members.
As we prepare for the move to a smaller home in the next six to 12 months, I take an Andy Dufresne approach to each day, doing the equivalent of dumping my pockets each time I leave the house. If I’m going to make daily progress, stuff must go every day. Here are four areas where I do just that:
FREEBIES: It’s understandably difficult to unload things we paid dearly for, either emotionally because of the cost or practically in terms of finding a buyer. But why do we build our clutter prisons with freebie t-shirts and promotional items? I’ve stopped the inflow by turning down giveaways but still am amazed at how many freebies I continue to discover cluttering my home and my life. If it was free, it’s not for me.
FURNITURE: The less stuff we own, the less need for furniture. Why own massive bookshelves, entertainment centers and armoires? My next home, whether owned or (more likely) rented, will include built-in clothes drawers in closets. I no longer want or need to own a dresser. There is perhaps no other consumer category that costs so much, takes up so much space, and is so hard to sell at any price than furniture.
If sitting is the new smoking, as some suggest, why own so many chairs and couches? Prisoner Andy Dufresne couldn’t wait to get his hour of time outside each day. So why with all of our freedom are we so content to spend most of our time inside sitting?
PAPER: The two most important minimalist tools are a quality shredder and scanner (or scanning service). There are few documents that must be kept in physical form. One of the biggest challenges is “sentimental paper” such as love letters, photos from the pre-digital era, children’s artwork, report cards, and perhaps your work product – all of which can be scanned. I’ve spent much of my career writing for magazines and recently had more than 1,500 pages of articles scanned, eliminating the need for five thick binders of articles in plastic sleeves (The scanning service kept the articles and I donated the sleeves and binders to a back-to-school drive.)
ENTERTAINMENT: Like many people, I’ve stopped purchasing books, CDs, and DVDs because of digital accessibility. I prefer reading physical books, but read only what’s accessible through the library, which is most everything if you’re willing to wait, at most, a few weeks. Each trip to the library I bring a bag of books I no longer need to donate toward the library’s monthly book sale.
I’ve donated CDs after uploading the ones I want to digital files and DVDs as well. There’s no longer a need to own entertainment. Heck, Andy Dufresne entertained himself for years at Shawshank with only books from the library and a rock hammer to carve a chess set out of rocks. He made beautiful chess pieces and the project proved a good cover story for his real need for a rock hammer.
I’ve purged all physical entertainment, but kept my Shawshank Redemption DVD. There might soon come a time when a DVD player is obsolete; I already can find the film on-demand. But rather than keep it concealed in the (since discarded) entertainment armoire, I display it on my mostly empty bookshelf, a visual reminder to keep tunneling to freedom every day.
