To be a man is to have temperance in one’s consumption and use of shoes. This universal rule is contradicted by my life. For you see, I owned shoes for every occasion. I had wedding shoes (a pair in white, and a pair in black), running shoes, shoes for everyday wear, shoes to wear around the home, formal shoes for non-wedding related occasions, and shoes specifically for BMX riding. Then I had back-up shoes for when those shoes wore out in the years to come.
Perhaps you can see the way in which this list of shoes is a typical man-ish problem… I had all these shoes based on purely utilitarian grounds! None I owned for style reasons, rather all had their place based on their use. With some ‘in-case’ shoes thrown in for good doomsday prep measures.
Obviously in my mind I felt it was appropriate to have a tool purpose built for the job and we know every job has that little oddity that requires a specialty fit. So obviously wedding shoes and hiking shoes are incompatible because the nuance required for each would naturally contradict each other or at least have very little overlap. Can one sensibly and with head held high walk into a job interview with bright blue running shoes on? Can one go jogging in anything but the specific shoes tailor advertised for such a purpose? No. No, one cannot do so in good conscience.
Except you can.
I got out my Swiss army knife of minimalism and activated my shoe-horn attachment with the direct purpose of ejecting my many shoes from my feet and from my home. It was a success. I am now left with one pair of Dr Martins and one pair of Vans (and some classic Filipino sandals mum bought me 3 or 4 years ago for Christmas).
So why am I writing about shoes? Because when I went through my minimalism fad, shoes were the hardest thing to get rid of for me and I felt their loss quite acutely. At the time I found that remarkable. How could this be the case? Let us ponder this together.
Strangely and ironically, one of the reasons it was difficult was because I actually had to wear in the shoes which I had owned for so long. How stupid is that? I had all these shoes which I had bought with the express purpose of wearing, that I was not wearing! In some sort of twisted lived parable I had to wear the price for not wearing in my shoes.
In an equally strange and ironic way, I also found it mentally difficult. It felt like I was wearing out the shoes that I had paid for. Which again made me think, couldn’t I just wear some cheap-ish shoes for everyday wear and not these Vans shoes? Again, how stupid is that? I bought these shoes to be worn and then worn out but I was treating them like fine china to house only the most exquisite tea… my feet.
Finally and most importantly however, I had this hangover from utilitarianism. The idea that I needed a pair of shoes tailor built to every particular activity was still growing from some stump left embedded in the soil of my mind. I think this final point has taken some time to settle down. It also keeps cropping up in other ways in my life, and I am in need of continually pruning it.
I doubt that there will be many who have had this exact experience themselves. But like I mentioned in my prior blogs on minimalism, perhaps you suffer from the same kind of tendency in a different guise. Perhaps it’s cooking accessories, tools, programs, or hair products. Of course, the point is not to deal with the stuff, but the heart issue that makes us think we need so much stuff. For me, getting rid of so many of my shoes was a time when I saw so clearly the extent to which cultural utilitarianism and consumerism had crept into my life.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 