How much is enough?

A few weeks ago I read something called The Little Brown Dress http://www.littlebrowndress.com/. The Little Brown Dress was an experiment by an artist (performance art?) who decided to only wear a little brown dress for 1 year. Yes, that is the smae dress for 365 days. She dressed it up and down, but the little brown dress was the foundation for the rest of her attire.

It made me think about how much we have and how much we truly need. I grew up in a household where money wasn't much of an issue. If you couldn't find something, you bought another. You did not wear the same thing within a two week period (if even within the month). My mother had at least 10 polar fleece vests. I know that she wore them to cover her chest (she had a bilateral modified radical mastecomy due to IBC - inflammatory breast cancer). My mother grew up with depression era parents and was extremely poor (no running water until the 1960s ). Everytime she went anywhere she felt as if she needed to buy somehting. She needed to feel as if she was not deprived.

Anyway, this weekend my mother in law (who should be a professional organizer) came to visit. She helped me clean Elyse's room. Elyse (almost 8) has sooo much stuff. She gets a lot of hand me downs from her sister and all of the older neighborhood girls. This means that she had more than could fit into her dresser. We purged and donated about 80% of what she had. Now she has only what can fit into her dresser. I have a feeling that I will be doing a lot less laundry of clean clothes.

How much does a young child need? Does my 3 weeks old really need a few dozen outfits? Is it a fashion statement? No - he needs to be clean and dry. Gavin needs a few more pants than I - as he may wet through. None of us are celebrities - we don't need to appear in something new each time we leave the house. No one would remember if we wore something before or not. We are all so self-conscious that we don't notice what others have or have worn before. We only think about how we think others will see us.

So, how many clothes do we really need? Yes, in our climate we need two sets - summer and winter, but how much in that? Unless we have work where we get very dirty or soil ourselves often (3 of my children do so) then we really don't need a lot.

My husband has 2 pair of jeans, a few t-shirts, 3 sweaters, a number of suits and scrubs. What does he work in? Scrubs. When he works around the house he wears jeans. He does not need much more than that.

Do my students really care what I wear? No. They attend class to learn about what I can teach them - not to see what I am wearing. If they only cared about what I looked like or what I was wearing, then we would have major problems! So, I am going to see how little I need.

I have decided to pare down what I have to the basics. Well, I am keeping the smaller sizes until I can get back into them - which may take a year, however, I really do need less than I have. Remember a year ago I was an accumulating shopaholic....

Simplifying my attire will simplify the amount of laundry I do, the less energy I use in laundry, less water, less space, less headache....

I think that anything more than what will fit into a dresser and a closet is too much. Just take a moment to think about all of the people who don't even have one change of clothing. Americans really do have too much stuff.