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I've heard from
and talked to many people who described how Mother Nature
simplified their lives for them. They'd lost their home and
many or all of their possessions through fires, floods,
earthquakes, mudslides, or some other disaster. Losing
everything you own under such circumstances can be devastating,
but the people I've heard from all saw their loss, ultimately, as
a blessing.
"The fire
saved us the agony of deciding what to keep and what to get rid
of," one woman wrote. And once all those things were no
longer there, she and her husband saw how they had weighed them
down and complicated their lives.
"There was
so much stuff we never used and that was just taking up
space. We vowed when we started over, we'd replace only what
we needed, and this time we'd do it right. We've kept our
promise: We don't have much now, but what we have is exactly
what we want."
Though we've
never had a catastrophic loss such as that, Gibbs and I did have a
close call shortly before we decided to simplify. At that
time we lived in a fire zone. One night a firestorm raged
through and destroyed over six hundred homes in our
community. That tragedy gave us the opportunity to look
objectively at the goods we'd accumulated.
We saw that there
was so much we could get rid of and not only never miss, but be
better off without. Having almost lost it all, we found it
much easier to let go of the things we knew we'd never use
again.
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