“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain

I think I would have to describe these past months of editing and downsizing into our one-bedroom apartment as rather epic. Harrowing would be too dramatic a description, but at times? Maybe just a bit…

But, now that we are close enough to calling it done, I’ve discovered an ironic byproduct.

Space.

We purged and edited and cut away whatever could be deemed excess so that we could fit it all into our new little world, and somehow, in spite of the much tighter footprint, we’ve actually discovered extra room. This is not the kind of room that can be measured in square footage, but rather, creative space and the time to use it.

There is freedom within an imposed structure, whether that structure is a haiku, sonnet, an hour of video reduced to a two-minute video, a tightly-worded article or a lifetime worth of accumulation cut to fit much smaller living quarters.

When I first started travel writing, I wrote a lot of 500-word travel stories for our local newspaper. It was generally understood that I could turn in something close to the required count. It would, after all, be edited. But I loved the challenge of nailing it at exactly 500 (I also hated it when someone would randomly cut a sentence). Instead, I would clip and cut and dig out the superfluous words until bam! I’d hit the mark…a very fine feeling indeed.

I brought that same technique to this move. For instance, I have kept shoes that were ‘perfectly serviceable’, even though they were not looking quite as sharp as they looked a decade ago. Same story on some items of clothing and a myriad of other kitchen and living room items.

During this downsizing, I created my new gold standard question. I’d hold up the item in question and say to myself, “Would you buy this in a second hand store?” Embarrassingly, a lot of my stuff didn’t survive that question. Yes, sometimes it was clothing that could keep someone warm or dry (and so it could still be donated) but did I actually feel good in it?

Uh. Nope. It was good enough but not exactly great.

As a result of this ruthless (and still ongoing) editing, I now have less clothes but more to wear (all that dodgy stuff was hanging there, pretending that they were outfit options…not!) I have fewer shoes and more usable footwear. Less square footage but more room to do nothing but think.

In short, we live in a much smaller home, but there’s no maintenance, and an entire city is our living room.

It’s taken time to get to this point. It has not been without its, shall we say, ‘moments’. But like any good edit, there is satisfaction from the effort.

I’m liking this new edited life. I’m liking it a lot.

Related articles

• Downsizing to an Apartment? Here’s What You Need to Know
• Property Wisdom – Make Do With Less
• Decision process of editing your wardrobe

Related articles