Posts
For anyone under the age of, say 30, what I'm about to tell you may come as a bit of a shock. You see, back in the good old days, people had stuff in their house that didn't have to plugged in, charged, docked, clipped on your belt, or downloaded. And, we had loads of it. At the risk of sounding like your Granny, when I was young my room was chocked full to the brim with loads of book, magazines, documents, notebooks, newspapers, needlework patterns, photo albums, scrapbooks and general debris. I think there's an reproduction of it at the Smithsonian Institution if you care to take a day trip to see it; you should find it somewhere near the Ice Age exhibition. Mind you, I did have a television set in my room, but it only received five stations and, thanks to a missing knob, changing channels could only be achieved by careful use of a pair of pliers whose home was the top of the TV cabinet.Having said that, I have to confess, I enjoy technology and openly embrace it; present and future generations are forever spared the panic of getting to a branch of their local bank before 5pm on a Friday or go without cash the entire weekend, paying bills by writing a check and affixing postage, running out of typewriter ribbon at a critical moment or.....leaving the house in general. Thanks to technology, my room of yesteryear exists no more. My scrapbooks and photo albums are all stored on little discs, my newspapers and magazines arrive to me mainly via my little cobalt gray laptop and the needlepoint wore out it's welcome some time ago. For a minimalist like myself, it's should be sheer nirvana.
I say should because the space vacated by these physical personal items have been replaced by all manner of technology related gizmos. Cables, cords and a spindle full of blank DVD-RW's (will I really need all that storage?) have replaced books in the storage space hidden in my La-Z-Boy sofa. The space formerly occupied by those bulky magazines is crammed full of yet more cables, adapters and connectors. In the "utility closet" is a docking station for my laptop, an external keyboard, an external floppy disk drive (young folks, look that up in Wikipedia), and an external USB port extension. In the hall closet is a box filled with all manner of software CD-ROM discs, most of which I don't think I need, but I'm too afraid to discard. Since I have no proper office, the printer, paper, ink cartridges and accessories occupy space beside my bed waiting to be connected when ready. Then there's the external sound systems; one for the laptop, and one for my cherished portable DVD player (which, with accessories takes up another shelf in the closet). I even found something called a wireless router tucked away at the back of a closet shelf. I have no idea how I came by it, what it's for, or how to use it, but it must have a purpose, so it stays.
So, technology has made my life simpler and more compact, but it certainly hasn't made it any more spacious. But while there's still slightly disorganized clutter tucked away in all corners of the house, it's not personal; they are merely accessories designed to make all my gadgets run a little better, swifter, and much, much louder. In other words, they're easily dispensable. The little gray laptop works just fine without them and the little gray laptop is the only piece of hardware that's really important, because it's allowed me to keep all those scrapbooks, photo albums, books, magazines, correspondence, vital records, etc. in one easy to carry package, and with files backed-up, they're safer than they would be in some musty boxes in a storage unit.
A minimalist's nirvana after all.
