In the past two months me and my family have been in the process of building a new home in the province. 

It’s interesting how I thought that by moving to a new place and having a new house, I can suddenly start being a new/different/better kind of person. 

I thought that when we got there, we would not only have new things, but more importantly, less things & less baggage from our current home. We would finally get to the forgotten items stored in boxes hidden in our storage rooms, give them away, sell, or dispose of them. I was telling myself that when I start living in a new place, I’d finally have a clean slate—literally & figuratively—and thus it would be easier to adapt a minimalist or essentialist lifestyle & aesthetic. 

With our plans to go back to the province cancelled, this grand idea of me becoming a new person became much more difficult to achieve because it is no longer mandatory. 

But if there is anything I learned in the past two months, it’s that the lifestyle changes I wanted to adapt in a new home are the same ones I need to have in my current one.

Despite our decision to stay, I feel a healthy amount of pressure to become more mindful of my surroundings, the things I let into my life in the form of purchases, people, food, and much more. For such a long time, I wanted to feel the freedom of having less but all these had remained to be ideas awaiting to be practiced.