Simply Sunday #8

Hello!  Hope you are having a stupendous Sunday.

Here are a few things I did this week in my journey towards voluntary simplicity:

(1) Went to the drive-in movies with our family.  We just recently found out there is actually a drive-in movie theater in our metropolitan area, and it is not that far away.  Tuesday is "family night" where the price of admission is a little lower than normal.  But frankly it is a pretty good deal all week for families.  Parents pay about what they'd pay at a regular theater, but kids are just a dollar each and you are welcome to bring your own food, which everyone does.  And we even got a double feature of kid films!  We brought our camping chairs and a picnic.  What a fun evening!  The weather is perfect right now in our neck of the woods.  Watching movies under the stars with my lovies while munching on treats.  Who could ask for more?!

(2) Cleaned out a dresser.  We have an antique-ish dresser in our hallway that we inherited from my husband's grandma.  (I say "antique-ish" because it is old, but not valuable in a monetary sense.  To me, the term "antique" sounds like something in a museum that needs to be insured.  Grandma's dresser ain't that!)  Unfortunately, this inherited dresser had become a junk drawer where my dear husband has hid things he didn't know where else to put.  I am happy to announce that I've cleaned out all the drawers in that dresser.  I've put two drawers to good use, and am now contemplating the best use of the others.  Yeah, organization and de-cluttering!

(3) Removed all purses from my husband's closet.  In our bedroom, there are two closets.  Because women have societally imposed expectations with regard to how they dress and I was working in a professional environment, I had a lot more clothes than I would have ordinarily wanted to own.  As a result of all this, for the past few years, I unfortunately occupied BOTH of the closets in our bedroom, and my husband used a small closet in the guest room.  Since leaving my paid gig, however, I've given a lot of my professional clothes away.  And I have more to sort through as I get time.  So, even though this paring down of my wardrobe is still a work in progress, for a couple weeks now my husband has been able to share one of the closets in our bedroom with me.  Rome was not built in a day--and unless you are Nero, it is not deconstructed in a day either!  I keep plugging away and this week I was able to give away more clothes and reorganize my main closet to take my purses out of the closet I share with my husband.  They are now on a shelf in my main closet.  He now gets 100% of the shelving space in our shared closet.  Progress! 

Don't tell my husband, but my eventual goal is that I will be down to one closet and he can have one closet fully to himself.  To be honest, voluntary simplicity is only part of the motivation.  He is rather a disorganized mess, so sharing a closet is stressful!

Multiple closets, antique-ish dresser, lots of clothes, the plural of "purse."  This may not sound like true voluntary simplicity.  But remember there is the ideal and then there is reality.  I'm not Mahatma Gandhi weaving my own cloth.  I'm a suburban mom in the 21st century in the U.S.  So, I share this kind of mundane stuff as an encouragement to you.  Voluntary simplicity is a journey.  It is not an all or nothing proposition.  You don't have to move to the country, raise all your own food and live off the grid.  Just start where you are now.  Everything counts.  All progress should be celebrated.