FFS Friday - Dumping

I've been thinking a lot lately about possessions, lifestyle, consumerism and how I want the boys to be raised. Our lifestyle has been very material and it's not how I want to be. I knew we were like that when we lived in the city, however I hoped that moving to the country would change us. It did change things for me, but not so much for Tiger. I'd love us to be on the same page when it comes to life goals and where we're heading but we're not. Tiger isn't one to have a plan or to think about what he wants from life, he just wanders aimlessly without any thought, which I find very frustrating.

A few weeks ago I watched the Minimalism documentary on Netflix. It was really interesting and inspiring. We have a whole houseful of possessions and yet most of them mean nothing to me. In a fire the only things I'd want to save is our identification, the hard drive with our photos on it and my coffee machine. Everything else can burn. If everything means so little to me, why do I still have it? What makes me hold on to things that I don't value?

Obviously some things I keep out of necessity. We need cooking utensils, towels etc but what about the rest of the stuff? Chai's art work I keep for sentimental reasons, I'd love to find a way to keep it all without it creating clutter. I need to come up with a filing system for it.

Slowly but surely I'm determined to go through the house and throw out everything we don't love or use.

I'm convinced that clutter contributes to a low mental state. Having so much clutter causes stress. It makes things more difficult and slows my brain. It also leeches my motivation and makes me not want to do anything. The problem with so much clutter is I don't know where to start. We've got a lot of stuff that we could sell and the money would be really helpful, but that means going through the clutter and re-organising it. I'm more inclined to donate it all to charity, it's a lot quicker and means that everything isn't hanging around once I've sorted it. 

The thought of getting rid of everything and starting again is very appealing. If I feel that way you'd think that decluttering would be easy and yet I still struggle to get rid of things, I suppose it's because I don't want to waste them. Getting rid of things isn't wastage though, because I give them away to friends or charity. 
For a while I struggled with how to get Tiger to change his point of view, but I've decided that I'll change myself and hopefully he'll see things differently because of that. I can only control myself, not the people or things around me.
So yeah. There's not really any point to this ramble, it's just a brain dump of my thoughts.