Do the "little things" really make us that much happier?

I am a very organized person. I am right on the cusps of being OCD about it but not totally pushed over into being a manic about it. There's room for imperfections in my home and I can turn a blind eye when needed. But I don't ever let complete chaos and mess rule my house. When you open my kitchen cupboards, everything is very nicely organized and I know where everything in my house is (well, almost everything). 

I say almost everything because I spent three days recently looking for my scentsy inserts. When I couldn't find them, I then started looking for scented candles. I could not for the life of me find them either. I was a bit frantic as we were in the midst of dealing with a wet dog who was over due for a bath.  In the third day when I gave up I decided that when I do finally find them, I'm tossing or donating them.  I would never again spend that much time looking for something so insignificant.

I also relented and took my dog to the groomers. She's bright and white and smells nice. 

I was also struck with the following realizations:

• Clearly I don't use them enough to even remember where I put them. In my approach towards minimalism, I want to remove things I don't use that often and require a lot of effort to store and make space for: both mentally and physically. 
• I don't need 15 ways to make my house smell nice. I don't need scentsy, pyramid, incense, stick incense, candles, essential oils, room sprays and more to make my house smell nice. 
• Not to mention that most of the ways to scent a house include packaging, bottles, petroleum, synthetic scents and more. 

I decided that I will only keep plain white tea lights for those times when the power goes out for a couple hours in the winter (they burn for 90 minutes and have proven to be just the right length for those few hours before bed), a few favorite essential oils I can diffuse in a pot on the stove. 

I can also use orange peels, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves and more as well when I diffuse the EOs in the pot. All items I already have in my cupboard and use them to make my own home made chai tea. Not to mention a far more natural approach and smells delicious and edible. 

What I learned from this experience is that if an item is taking that much effort to track and use and store, it is not really worth it at all. A person might decide to use only high quality scented candles instead and that's fine. But I would challenge them to refrain from buying 10 other ways to scent their house. Maybe just stick with incense only or use up your essential oils.  Someone may even opt not to use any scents at all in an effort to truly minimalize. However, if you're like us, you might have dogs and sometimes those nice fresh smells are a bonus. 

For a natural way to make your house smell nice, adding of the following to a pot of water and simmer on very low. Do not leave unattended. Be sure to play around with the mixture. I sometimes only use lemon peels and nothing more. Sometimes I blend cinnamon sticks, cloves and orange peels. Sometimes I only use lavender and Rosemary (all items right outside my front door). 

Bay leaves

Cinnamon sticks

Orange peels

Cloves

Rosemary

Lavender

Lemon peels

Thyme

Vanilla

I'm going to become much more stingy in what I store. Not just in the scent department but in everything. I recently challenged my husband to stream line our flashlight collection. We were in a place where we had twelve different flashlights that all take varying battery sizes and of course, we rarely have the right battery size for most of them. We noticed that there are always two that we reach for when needed and we only grab the rest because we either can't find our favorites or because the batteries are dead and we have no extras. When he balked and presented some of the reasons to keep them, I challenged him back. For example, one of the reasons he wanted to keep them all is in case we can't find our two favorites, I countered that if we have less stuff to keep track of, we won't be "losing" them to began with. I also proposed that we will have more space for batteries and have less to track in terms of varying battery sizes. 

There have been times we have had 12 flashlights in the house but no batteries. How ridiculous is that?  After a smooth debate, he agreed that the ideal scenario to keep our very favorites we use the most and get rid of the rest. Use the space we free up to stock up on batteries for those ones.  One of the models my husband loves is rechargeable which is even better. We live in the country where the power goes out frequently, so a high quality flashlight with enough batteries makes the sense as well. 

Being well organized has it's benefits and it makes it very easy to obtain more items as a result. But it still requires great mental capacity to do it. It still requires you to stop and spend a few minutes thinking about where you stored the items.  It still requires effort to resort, reorganize and shuffle things around. Someone suggested one time I make an inventory list. This is one of the worse advice you can give someone who's on the cusp of being manic OCD about organizing. Keeping a list would not simplify my life. It would give me another challenging mental task to track. And since I am I'm in a period of my life where I want to be doing the things I *really* want to do such as spending time with my daughter and husband...  Keeping track of a list will give me yet another project and yet another reason to ignore them. No thank you. 

Someone might argue that "the little things in life make us happy."  This quote had to come from a collector, a hoarder or someone who liked to shop a lot. Because honestly, the little things in life have been nothing more than distractions for me so far. If I sit down and make a list of the top ten most important things in my life, on that list you won't find "having 15 ways to make my house smell nice".  Heck, you won't even find it on my top one hundred list. But you bet your bottom right right cheek that spending more time engaged with my family is right up along with being kinder to the to the earth. Having multiple things to keep track of interferes with both of of those. 

I am already finding reprieve in the small ways we are minimizing. Less scent items to track, less flashlights to go on manhunts for. But most of all, just the giving myself the gift that we don't *need* more. Putting myself in a space where I am spending less time cleaning, sorting and organizing and more time doing things with people I love. That has been the greatest gift of all.