The past few weeks I have hit a point in my life for change. This is not a mid life crisis. I am not losing my mind(at least I don’t think so) and have not gone off the deep end towards drugs, tattoos, and growing my hair long. Rather, I am going in a different direction in trying to simplify my life.
This summer I have hit this place mentally that I don’t know how to describe. It is not a state of depression. It is not a state of extreme happiness either. Motivation comes and goes but not in the directions that I want it to be. So, the first thing I had to do was QUIT. I quit training for triathlons, marathons, and endurance events. I QUIT running, biking, and swimming all together. Now, I plan on coming back to these as well as my health and nutrition and exercise, but what I discovered was that I had other things to take care of in my life.
What I needed to do was simplify my life. I was and still am in many ways spread too thin. I have taken on more than I can chew. My personal expectations of myself can be quite rigid and what I was doing was burning myself out. I had nothing left in the tank. It was time to do some things differently and take a good hard look at myself.
Just a few weeks ago we went on our first family vacation of seeing the ocean. Technically it was the Gulf, but to the kids it was all ocean. During that time I created a Digital Detox challenge for myself that really opened up my eyes. I kept it going longer than planned and during that time as I was trying to write a book on education, I found a new avenue of writing on my life and the changes going on during this detox. From that point I have made some headway(the most in all my five years of book writing attempts) in writing a book.
As I continue to make change in three key areas: Detox, Declutter, Decaffeinate(this might change to Decline) I will keep writing and documenting what I am learning. It has not been easy for me, but has opened my eyes to some new paths of insight and learning.
One of these areas is decluttering or working towards a minimalist lifestyle. I will never achieve true minimalism, but I can sure as heck make some strides.
This post here is the launch of a challenge that I am putting upon myself. I read a blog post when researching how to declutter and achieve a minimalist lifestyle of a 30 day challenge in which you start with getting rid of one item on the first day, two the second, etc. until you reach getting rid of 30 things on the final day.
I am going to mix it up and adapt this challenge. I have already started to get rid of stuff. I have cleared out 3 garbage bags of junk from my office. I have many things for sale on ebay. I am going to consider the last two weeks as day one. It is a jumpstart. Instead of working in order of day one, one item, day two, two items, I am going to have a check off system from 1-30. It will not matter which day I mark off, but all 30 days have to be marked in the 30 day period. The reason being is that I have many items already up for sale on ebay. They won’t count unless they sell so some days I might have several items sell and other days zero. I might hit a part of my stuff where I can toss a ton of stuff and other days I just don’t have it in me to sell/trash anything.
I am also going to add a new rule. If I buy anything for myself I have to get rid of something in return. With school starting and little exercise it will require buying some fat pants and some new things to prepare for another year.
Each day I will document my journey along with adding these ideas to my book.
Feel free to join me. By making this public it will hold me accountable. I have a hard time holding myself accountable at times.
You might be asking what this has to do with education and learning. I will tell you straight up – EVERYTHING!
If you are not satisfied as a person how can you expect to bring your best to the classroom every single day?
Declutter is good in my house as well as my classroom. Perhaps the Coffeechug Cafe will be the next challenge!
I have already started the challenge so each post will be from a prior day to give me time to write and reflect.
This might end up being one of the most difficult things I have done.
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