How Moving to New York City Turned Me into a Minimalist
It was a bittersweet decision for us to pack our family up and away from the life that my kids have always known. While it was a practical move in that we needed the space, it was much harder than I thought to leave our small apartment that I watched many of my kids’ “firsts” in. Our life in the city was a great learning experience. We moved there shortly after I had my oldest daughter, Harlan. We had a house in Tampa that we had just recently bought and completely furnished. I was scared for both myself and my family of what moving to Manhattan would do for us. Little did I know that it would be one of the best decisions we could make. Our apartment in the city was a small two-bedroom. We kept a lot of things in a storage unit and put the necessities in the apartment. With the lack of space, it didn’t take me long to learn that we didn’t need most of the “stuff” that I thought we did when we lived in our house in Tampa. Every time the girls got a new toy, they had to donate one to a child in need. Rather than keeping every little piece of baby memorabilia, I kept only the things that I knew I would be able to use later on. My life soon went from “I need this product” to “I don’t need much.” For the first time in my life, I was learning the true value of simplicity — and I loved it. A couple of weeks ago, as we were unpacking the boxes from our storage unit that we hadn’t seen in the five years since moving from Tampa, my husband and I both laughed at some of the things we kept because we thought we couldn’t live without them. To be honest, most of the things that we had in storage I hadn’t thought about since we packed them up five years ago. It was then that we started a “donate” pile, which quickly racked up most of the things that were in our storage unit. Not only did we become a family of five and make some incredible memories, but we learned some pretty valuable life lessons as well.
