My life in a 23kg bag or the journey towards minimalism

After 1 year and a half living in the country, I think it’s time to share the biggest challenge I faced when I moved to Canada.

I brought up the idea of settling in Canada to my life partner at the beginning of 2016. We were in London, UK and together for a year and few months. Since eight years, I was longing on the idea to immigrate to Canada so I was ecstatic when he agreed to join my adventure. The application process preparation took us what seemed forever. We applied six month later, in June 2016. It took a year and a month for our application to be received, processed and reviewed and accepted.

The minimalist and the hoarder.

When the time came to prepare the actual move, my partner came up with an unusual suggestion: “let’s move with one suitcase and one backpack only and get rid of the rest”. After being settled for eight years in UK, I had acquired so much stuff that the idea of downsizing to only one bag seemed insane! To give a bit of background info, he calls me a hoarder and I call him an extreme minimalist. I get attached to inanimate material things and it becomes difficult to separate from them. Nevertheless, I thought that our move to Canada would be a new beginning for both of us individually as well as for us as a couple and, therefore, a perfect opportunity to start fresh.

The art of letting go can be applied to every aspects of life.

At that time, I had not yet read Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but somehow, I applied a similar technique. I went through every single item I owned and asked myself: do I really need it? Will I use it? Can it serve multiple purposes? It was a long process and we had to do three trips to the local charity shop to donate all the items (my partner helped, even though there was not much of his stuff). After several attempts, I eventually managed to reduce my material belongings to my backpack and that bag of 23kg; having one bag is one thing but the airlines are limiting the weight too.

It was the most challenging part of our move, but all in all the experience taught me how to rethink my necessities, be resourceful, let go and embrace minimalism.

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