After 4 nights in a 24-bed dorm room, it was time to pack up.
We’d moved into our last hostel right after bidding farewell to the rest of the family, and were left with an assortment of reshuffled luggage.
Mom had downsized from her large suitcase to a smaller one, which had gone back with Mama to make room for their shopping. However, her belongings (along with all the snacks we brought from India) didn’t quite fit into the new suitcase, so she had to stash the rest in a sizable blue backpack Mami had brought but didn’t end up using. This, in addition to the small backpack she was already using, meant she now had three bags in total — an overall weight reduction, but a much bigger hassle to carry.
Meanwhile, I still had my original suitcase, now stuffed to the brim with some of Mom’s belongings that (still) wouldn’t fit into her own bags. As we sat in the hostel kitchen after checking out, trying to squeeze her woolens into the poor near-exploding blue backpack in a way that would let the solitary buckle holding everything together to still fasten, I tutted to myself.
I describe the struggles with mom’s stuff, but I’d brought far more than I would’ve liked to, too. Before the trip, I had planned to be a minimalist in Japan. In fact, While I had the weight allowance to bring a large suitcase, I deliberately chose a smaller option to curb unnecessary shopping. The plan was to leave half the suitcase empty, anticipating some hopefully modest shopping (we were going to be here a pretty long time, after all).
Clearly, that plan didn’t go as expected. By the time I finished packing in London, my small-to-medium-sized suitcase was somehow full. (I’m not sure if it applies to space too, but I blame Parkinson’s Law.)
I reassured myself that some clothes and small items would be offloaded onto Mom and the rest of the family (including the fridge magnets and gifts I had brought). Mom had told me she was only packing essentials, and the rest of her suitcase was filled with food, which would get consumed quickly. The idea was that once the food was gone, she would have plenty of space for my things ‘with loads to spare’.
‘Ideally.’
That’s obviously not what happened.
We grossly overestimated our appetites and most of the food was still with us.
We also both ended up packing more clothes than necessary, for reasons I can’t fully justify (and won’t even try).
And as if we weren’t already regretting the results of our bad decisions, we found a plush velvety sweatshirt in Dad’s size hanging outside a shop on our way to the station, on sale. It was lovely, in our defence. And since it wasn’t for us, we didn’t feel guilty buying it at all.
Like the fairytale notion of mom’s would-be half-available suitcase previously, we were now considering my dad and aunt’s luggage allowances. They’d be joining us in a few days’ time and we’d told them to travel ‘light but big’, i.e. with tons of empty space, as safety nets for our shopping.
If we were staying in one place for a long time, this would have all been a non-problem. An inconvenience for a day, at most, when we were to travel back.
But we were on the move every few days, and not just within Tokyo. Today, we had to take 2 connecting trains to Sakura City — an area close to Chiba, 1.5 hours east of where we were previously staying.
If the fact that we were already struggling to haul our 5 existing bags wasn’t enough of a sign — probably as instant karma for the newly-bought sweatshirt — we somehow got on the wrong connecting train (I swear Google Maps said it was the one!), only realizing it 15 minutes in and having to backtrack, costing us an hour, a fair amount of self-loathing and many, many calories.
But now that I think of it, if I can spend over a month in a foreign country with what’s currently in my suitcase, there’s really no reason to keep anything that’s still waiting for me back home in London.
In fact, right before this trip I was debating sending a lot of it back home to India.
Someone more rational than myself might immediately think of donating the extra.
I, unfortunately, am a rather sentimental being, and I get more attached to material things than I’d like. For example, I take Dhanno, a toy horse I received as a birthday gift, to bed with me every night.
The problem with decluttering my space in London by sending things somewhere else, in this case India, is obviously that wherever those things go will then become cluttered and it’ll either become someone else’s problem or, more likely, my own future problem.
So, I need to find a way to (1) reduce the amount of stuff I own (without just passing the problem on), and (2) make sure it doesn’t start accumulating again.
The first step should be to stop buying new things. Gifts, or consumables (basically things I’ll soon be rid of) are okay, but if I’m buying something long-term for myself, it needs to be something truly valuable. I can also adopt a “buy one, donate one” policy, which will help me become more selective about what I buy, as I’ll only get something if it’s worth swapping out something I already own.
The next and probably more difficult part is reducing what I already have. I’ve realized that donating within the family has always been an effective and emotionally easy way for me to get rid of things, especially in the case of clothes. There are lots of women in my family who I’m close to and who my clothes fit, and it brings me joy knowing my clothes are still loved and being put to good use right where I can see them.
I’m not a minimalism guru or anything. I’m not even trying to be a perfect minimalist (not everything is ‘adoptable’, and I doubt I have the willpower to just throw out everything unessential).
I’m just trying to be better than I am, and these steps make sense to me and seem actionable.
I can say on a higher level as I sit and write this that I’ve learned my lesson. But the real test will be the next time I see a shiny new thing that I absolutely must buy but also absolutely must not.