Responsibility series #2: Craft a space you love

Bring intention to your stuff and space

I will be more active with my writing in the coming weeks. If you read what I write, I would love your feedback, so I can understand what you like and what you don’t like. I’m mostly building on word of mouth here, so if you find what I say interesting, it’d be super meaningful to me that you refer me to your friends 😊

Diving in.

A man of ideas 💡

I’ve always been much more into ideas than things. Things were a necessity, I didn’t enjoy them. Thus not surprisingly, I’ve never fallen into the materialistic trap of always wanting more. Good stuff! it was aligned with my ecological ideologies.

The thing is, I was shying away from material concerns. I was, deep down, actually resenting the ideological constraints I was holding myself accountable to: I was still trading the same coin, just the other face of it.

And I was entertaining a shadow (Jungian concept) and thus had an unhealthy relationship with materiality.

An attempt at healthy materiality 🪵

I realized I had to get my stuff in order to feel better.

A few months back, I watched the documentary Minimalism. It resonated and triggered the question: what do I need? I started giving away stuff that I didn’t need anymore. It felt great! I was laying the first blocks of intentionality in organising my space.

Today, a few months later, my apartment is de-cluttered. There is less material noise, I am surrounded mostly by things I love. And I gave away stuff for charity, which was also super rewarding. Of course, it’s a process, and the more you pay attention to it, the more critical you get, and the closer you get to your ideal.

The second step was about addition: what do I miss that would make me feel great? On that, I still battle with my limiting beliefs around money and consumption (will be the topic of a future article), but I’ve recently invested in two things: a new speaker and a writing tablet. Those purchases fuelled my need to fully engage in activities I love: listening to music and writing.

To some degree of analysis, these purchases are superfluous. But they are what I can do best today, to match my desires to engage in the world, be productive, have fun and respect my ideologies… And if they end up being sub-optimal purchases, I’ll just sell them back or give them away. No big deal - at least saying so calms my perfectionist mind 😉

What I love about all of it, and why I write about it, is the mindset: I don’t let things go out of control, I set intention and I go about it. I organise my exterior world so it looks like me and helps me thrive.

PS: Healthy materiality goes much further than stuff. It is also about money, work, sexuality… A lot of the prevalent ideologies in the West like Christianism actually still have powerful latent (or direct) impact on how we see those things, mostly despising them (funny how that works huh? some people feel guilty yet they over-consume, that same coin again…). I’m personally working towards uncovering these societal beliefs I hold subconsciously and choosing the ones I wish to incarnate for my future.

Responsibility 👩🏻‍⚖️

So why is that part of the responsibility series? 👨‍🏫

Remember, responsibility is taking ownership over how you are in the world. About how you feel, how you act… No one is responsible for you, you are a grown up adult.

At a first level, setting an intentional space is directly taking responsibility for how you feel in your environment, by removing visual or mind trash. Don’t neglect the importance of that! First it’s a good self-love practice. Second it’s a good test of how much responsibility you can take: if you can’t handle setting something up for yourself and your loved ones, you’re probably not able to handle higher levels of responsibilities. Indeed, it’s easier to have higher-order judgements when you are comfortable with lower-order judgements.

At a higher level, it’s taking responsibility of actually buying stuff and thus consuming resources: you make a moral commitment that you’ll have a use of the product, and that you’ll take care of the end-of-life cycle of it so it doesn’t have bad externalities on your shared ecosystems.

The higher your standards, the higher-level responsibility you will want to take, and the harder it will be! But it’s also worthier, and more fun. The life game wouldn’t be exciting if there wasn’t different levels of complexity, would it?! 😃

Are you excited about taking responsibility over how your place looks, feels, and fuels you on a daily basis?

Practical tips 🔩

General tips:

• be conscious, aware, notice the little things that bother you in your space. Meditation exercises can help!

• act on things, little my little, it will get easier with time, and snowball

If you’re like me and want to avoid putting things to trash, you can try:

• giving them away to neighbours (putting stuff in shared spaces works fine for me)

• finding social resale shops around you

• if things are too broken: use specialised recycling processes (like for cloths, electronics…)

If you’re like me, and have trouble buying something without feeling guilty:

• read the sustainability and ethical papers of brands you are considering (if they don’t have one, it’s probably not for you)

• carefully consider your need, and feel if you have a “whole body yes”: do your guts, heart, and head agree about that? are you only considering it on a whim? or does that fuel one of your deeper purposes?

Parting words

I hope you got a few interesting insights from this piece. As always, please comment or reach out if you’ve got comments, ideas or feedback for me!