Eco audit: shrinking then growing

No, I’ve not given up on the blog.  But the arrival of builders, and the shrinking of available space (because everything’s piled up in the rooms that are available), means that there’s not much headspace for words.

But still.  I want to keep going on this month’s series – while also being overtaken by what’s current in the flat, and how those two things might come together, in words.

This post’s title reminds me of Alice, combining her ‘grow bigger’ and ‘grow smaller’ intake to try to get to the right size.  She found it hard.  So am I, right now.

I wrote earlier this month about the difficulty of reducing – buying less, consuming less.
The other side of the coin is what we do with what we’ve already got – we may commit to bringing less in through the door, but do we also reduce what we have, and keep it that way?

I am thinking of my teenage self, focus for this month’s posts.  In my teens, I lived in one house for a long time (all of my secondary school years, anyway).  And I got a chance to put down roots – including in the space I lived in.

We use our homes to ground us, as well as to say who we are. I found it hard to let go of clutter in my room, in my teens – because it summed up who I was, but also the stability I wanted.  This was partly that teenage search for identity, partly the result of moving house a lot, and having to keep changing things.

At that stage in life, I was happy to buy my recycled paper, lecture my parents on recycling, and make what environmental decisions I could.  But reducing what was in my room? No thanks.

Now, we’ve lived in one place for the longest time I’ve ever lived in one place.  And with the build, it feels like we are simultaneously still at home, and also moving house.

Why should this have an impact? Because moving also does things for you on the eco front.  It allows you to reconsider what is around you, and what you take with you into the new place.

Coincidentally, I have been reading more about living with less – not just from an environmental point of view, but to reduce stress.  What I’ve been reading is purposed at reducing stress for kids, but with benefits for the whole family.

So what’s preoccupying me is: once the new room is ready, do we just shlepp all the piled up stuff into that space? Or do we use it as an opportunity to think again about what we live with?

For various reasons, we’ve been living without access to a certain amount of stuff for some time.  It’s been piled up in the study, and I made decisions on what we needed to get at, and what we could live without for a while.  So in fact, that helps in making decisions – because we know we’ve genuinely done without it for a time, and it’s been OK.

We are collectors in this family, (all right, hoarders), but we are also recyclers, repurposers. We are shrinking right now, in our living space, in order to grow into a bigger space once the building work is done.

I don’t know what that will look like.  But I hope that we can make the right decisions to help us all ‘grow’ when the whole flat is available to us again.  I think that growth will be different if we can agree to live with less, and to keep going that way.

Wish us luck.