Recently (if this term can cover a period of up to three years) I have a feeling that my life has been a constant commuting from point A to B. Indeed, I have moved numbers of times for different reason, and besides that, well, I live in London. What venture it truly is, no one knows better than a friend of mine who has been helping me to move my life's possesions, equally divided between eighty plastic bags. He had a moment of doubt after he saw a bag full of eggs going into his van, but come on, a whole bag of eggs, I couldn't just leave it behind!
My mother used to call me a 'world famous trash collector', for my blame lies not in buying things: rather the difficulty in leaving anything that lies abandoned on a street unattended. I've found wonders on my way during my lifetime: a first-class iron, a sassy carrier bag, a laundry dryer to name a few. It might come easy to dispose of something hastily bought on discount, or an unwanted gift from last Christmas, but it will never seem right to get rid of something that had been placed on your way by destiny, to materialize itself in front of you, yours for the taking. That's how I've been explaining to myself my ownership of over two hundred old flyers from events I didn't go to and few issues of 'Metro' I didn't have time to read. I am not going to mention pens, pencils and hair elastics and few other things that I am unsure of what they are. I never bothered to understand motives of people who throw things away. I thought it was another 'scandi' fashion, and just like misunderstood hygge, all-white decor and love for IKEA, it will pass, the way any trend does. But that was before I heard of dan-sha-ri.
Dan-sha-ri is a concept presented in a book by Hideko Yamashita, and it encourages to lead the life that is not overwhelmed by things. It's logical and appealing: things exist to be used, and when we don't used them, we should dispose of them. It should seem easy since material things are not objects of any emotional value- or rather, they shouldn't be. Dan-sha-ri should allow you a safe space to breathe. The gathering of things make your life a mess, it is difficult to focus in a messy place, and objects to which we have once assigned emotional value now hold us back in the past. And maybe first of all, the concept does not renounce the role material objects play in our lives: it encourages us to control them, before they start controlling us. I try really badly not to think about how that bag of eggs has controlled my life, but I can feel the potential lightness coming out of having less. Less things that you don't need.
I have started my adventure by dan-sha-ri from step one: avoiding. So I keep avoiding taking things home with me (and actually people as well, just in case if they started accumulating), with one major failure that made me staring all day long on that flyer I didn't have a heart to throw away. At the meantime, I managed to get rid of that one plastic bag containing old Pepsi labels. Life seems so much easier now.
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