Emergency or sudden change will happen out of blue.
It’s very rare for me to experience some kind of sudden change or emergency but this time, it did happen to me.
I had to move out of my place in two days after the notification came to me.
Let’s take a look at the details of what happened to me and why being a minimalist has significantly helped me out.
Let’s dive into it.
What happened to me?
It happened all suddenly last week.
As I have written on my profile page, I’m going to move to Sweden this month; technically in three days from today.
Last Tuesday I was waiting for the date of the interview at the embassy to be decided, and on Tuesday noon it turned out that Thursday morning will be the interview time.
If I miss that date, the next interview will be a week after which is exactly the same date as my flight, so I had to show up last week Thursday morning in Tokyo.
Knowing that I had to leave Kobe, my hometown pretty far from Tokyo, in two days, and even though I am an extremely minimalist, I was completely freaked out.
I had my apartment contract till the end of February so the contract was no problem but the problem was dealing with the bed, cooking equipment, and other small belonging.
After all, what I did was move small furniture out to my parent's house twice.
That was it.
I didn’t even use a car to move those things out, I just took a bus twice.
Why I was able to make it on time?
So from now let’s think about why I was able to move out in less than two days even though I have never expected that.
The reason I could do this is obviously that the number of my belongings is extremely low.
I do not own many things, I do not like to own many things, and I am good at managing impulsive shopping emotions.
Minimalist lifestyle tips: How to manage impulsive shopping emotions?
I have an article published about handling the impulsive shopping motion, so if you regret every time you purchase something without expectation, my blog post about this topic will be something valuable to read.
I was able to become an extreme minimalist very easily because when I was one year old, the most catastrophic earthquake in Japan in its history "Great Hanshin Earthquake" attacked Kobe and its surrounding areas including Osaka.
(Please read about the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Wikipedia if you want)
Since then, my parents have been telling me that things will break and get lost easily so it’s not good to stick to the attitude of having a massive quantity of objects.
If it’s not an earthquake, every single place on the Earth has its own natural disaster, and what’s worse is no one can expect when a natural disaster happens, but it will definitely happen at some point.
Being an extreme minimalist, I am living a life of not purchasing many luxurious things quite often but a life with lots of appreciation for nature, time, human relationships and small positive things that happen to me every day.
What you can do in your daily life?
Let’s talk about what can you do in your daily life to prepare for an unexpected natural disaster or sudden move-out in terms of minimalism.
One thing I can say is to decrease the quantity and increase the quality of the belongings.
By this, I mean to focus on quality not quantity for every single thing you buy.
Princess which is better for you, having 20 of €50 shoes or 1 pair of very good shoes that is €1,000?
Minimalist Lifestyle Tips; Do not buy many cheap things
but buy one that lasts for a lifetime
I am a person who always tries to research a lot before purchase, so I prefer to go with a high-quality product but only one purchase in a decade or something like that.
Minimalist lifestyle fashion advice: The 3 clothes 2 colours rule
To start decreasing your belongings while cleaning your house please refer to the below article to know more about the concrete steps on how to clean your house very easily.
The method I have introduced in the above article is a very easy three-step that everyone can follow to achieve the goal clean the place.
The second thing you can do in your life is to start thinking about what is important for you and what is not important for you.
Definition of minimalism lifestyle: what makes your lifestyle minimalism?
As I have written in the above article, minimalism is not just a quantity of objects but it’s more about the mentality of one thinking about own life.
If you think you can become a minimalist by throwing away your whole belongings, it’s not true.
Minimalism is the way of thinking and its purpose is to enhance the quality of life.
So in terms of the psychological aspect, you want to know what is important for you and what is not important for you.
Minimalist lifestyle tips: thinking about the meaning of "Less is more"
Once you know those differences, you’ll be able to focus on the things that are important to you, so that at the end of the day your day is filled with tasks or events that are very important to you.
I think this is the key to enhancing the quality of life and at the same time decreasing the object you have.
Back to the natural disaster example, if you truly know what is important to you and given that it’s not an object that you own, losing the things by facing a natural disaster wouldn’t be your psychological damage.
(Of course, there must be a lot of physical damage but let’s put it aside because right now I’m talking about the psychological aspect.)
If you encounter a natural disaster and lose your entire house without knowing what’s important for you and what it’s not, you may regret losing a lot of objects in a second.
In my case, no one can take away my quality of life and happiness of life because my standard is completely not related to the number of objects or the digits of the bank account.
To sum up this blog post, I would like to say that being a minimalist is an amazing way of life.
The upside of being a minimalist is that I had not spent any money at all to become a true minimalist because as I have mentioned earlier, minimalism is an attitude towards life and one feature of minimalism is just having fewer things than other people.
So if you want to change your attitude towards your own life, please read my posts about minimalism and I hope there are some tips that you can learn from my experience to enrich your quality of life.
Thanks for reading always