Learning without forcing others to learn

Both choices for writing this week were interesting but the first one got me thinking about something that I always keep in mind and has honestly helped me get a lot of heavy burdens off my shoulders.

What's the most valuable lesson you've learned from minimalism that still holds true today?

That I can't force others to see less as more. But let me tell you how I learned it.

I grew up in a maximalist household, but besides that most of the people I knew also had houses full of stuff. So when visiting close relatives, what I saw around me was a lot of ornaments, pictures and furniture, so I learned that it was normal, that's how a house should be.

And so the way we are raised and what we are taught is ingrained in our minds and sometimes it's too hard to get it out of our minds. But sometimes we have struggles with what we are taught and what we learn according to our own experiences, for example, when I was a teenager and my mother had given me some tasks at home, when I tried hard to fix the family home I noticed that it still looked a little messy, so I was one of those people who constantly moved everything around to see if I could make it look tidy.

So it was like a kind of mental contradiction that I had that the normal thing is to have a lot of things at home but at the same time I do not like how a house looks with a lot of things. But everything changed for me when I had my own family and lived in my own house, like all families starting out we didn't have too much stuff just the necessities, a couple of chairs kitchen fridge and bed and Wao, it was little but it felt good.

My husband also grew up in a maximalist house, and surprisingly he felt the same way I did, we liked that there was space and that we only had what we needed. So even though there were no rules, it was implicit that accumulating furniture or anything else was not something we were going to do in our house.

The way I felt having only what we used and nothing else made me want my family to feel the same way, mainly my mom, this was a long and exhausting process because I kept telling her that if she had less stuff she would feel more comfortable, everything would look tidier and it would be easier for her to clean. I was convinced of this, but I could not convince her. I learned something at that moment that sometimes having some deficiencies can lead us to develop certain habits, or to also want to have everything that we once lacked.

The moment I understood that my mom did not grow up the same way I did, and that maybe it makes her feel good to wake up every day and see that her house has many pictures or many ornaments that she did not use to see when she was a child, I stopped asking her insistently to throw away some things or to try to have only what they use, because honestly minimalism is something that makes me feel good, but not her because of the way she grew up.

So the way we were raised influences many aspects of our life, we talk about physical aspects but the emotional is a little bit more complex although similar, because sometimes some people are comfortable with some habits that may be causing them harm, maybe even traumas or emotional wounds that are still open but they are not ready to heal, and obviously it is difficult but we have to resist the temptation to want to pressure them to change certain things in their life and that.

Because the truth is that we cannot control what others do, or force them to make changes based on what we have done and what has caused us good, everyone is free to be and when I learned it, it was the same as when I decided that unlike everyone around me I liked few things at home and a simpler life, I also felt better, without a burden, without so much mental clutter.

Anyway now I know that the fact that I decided to live with less burdens, lighter and so much noise does not mean that all the people I love have also decided to do so, I was free to do so and so are they and I think that accepting that not everyone sees minimalism as I do, is also minimalism.