My journey to simplicity

Sometimes, people ask me how to be a minimalist. They wonder if minimalism is about being frugal, or protecting the environment, or design. My answer is: it can be. When I started streamlining in one aspect of my life, the relief and wellbeing I felt from those actions propelled me into tackling other aspects. At the end of the day, every minimalist’s environment will look different. What’s beautiful or useful to you may be unnecessary clutter to me. There’s no absolute right way to be a minimalist. As long as you remove what doesn’t fit in your life and you’re content with your environment and way of life, you’re winning at minimalism. I don’t particularly like writing specific “how to” articles. And if you search online, I’m sure you’ll find a plethora of articles discussing this topic. So who am I to give you advice? However, I’ve been living it. So I can tell you about what’s been working for me. At first, I was going to put everything in one article. But a...

"Packing and moving is overwhelming." I texted Mr. Romantic one late August Sunday morning as I was alone at the condo looking over my stuff. Even though I've gotten rid of many, many, things over the past year and a half, I still have stuff. And that stuff needed to be moved out of the condo.   Now that all of that stuff has been moved, Mr. Romantic and I are working on finding a place for whatever I moved into our home. Two fully functioning households need to be combined. So far, he’s been excellent in making room for me in our home, even if that means getting rid of some of his stuff.   We’ve been deciding together whose stuff to keep. For example, some of my small appliances (like my food processor and blender) were better quality than the ones he had, so we kept mine. But most of his pots and pans were much better quality than mine, so we kept his. However, I did supplement with a few of mine when he didn't already have something equivalent that I enjoy...

I had the chance to live in downtown Ottawa for almost a year. I had fantasized about doing so when I was a teenager in the 90s wandering around downtown to temporarily escape, even if just for the day, my suburban home where I lived with my parents and my little sister. It seemed to me that living downtown would be THE life. I mean, come on… all the downtown cafés and bars and boutiques and museums and people. I had this romantic idea in my head of living in an old apartment building with high ceilings, charming creaky wood floors and thick baseboards. I would write and paint and draw and have cool artistic and eccentric friends drop by on a whim. Fast forward to 2015-2016. I finally got my chance to live downtown, but in an old 80s condo that has seen better days. The commute to my government job was fantastic – a mere 5-minute walk. But the ceilings were regular height. The floors were a combination of ugly white tiles and ordinary laminate. I wrote on my laptop in my bed. I didn’t ...

As promised, here is my final report to you on this experience. "But wait, Dominique. This can't be a report on the end of your Whole30... it hasn't even been 30 days yet!" You're right. I chose to end the Whole30 before the day 22 supper. Yep. With only 8 days to go, I decided to stop. It was just too much. I started a new job on Monday (day 22). Although it was a nice first day, I underestimated the effect that the disruption in my routine would have on me. I felt exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed. Close to breaking. So I gave myself a break before I would break. Mr. Romantic and I had supper at a restaurant with the kids after I was able to convince him that I really was OK with my decision. And I am. Really. I still feel like I benefited from this Whole21.66. The pain in my butt is gone and I lost 10.2 lbs. But more importantly, for breakfast and lunch on what would have been day 23, I made less than ideal food choices. All that did was make me crave...