0 to 40. The lower your score, the more ready you currently are to downsize.
If your score is 0–12, you’re already in pretty good shape. But be sure to carefully read the next chapters in order to look for trouble spots you haven’t anticipated.
If your score is 13–26, you should allow yourself plenty of time and introspection to get yourself more prepared for the challenge ahead.
If your score is 27–40, you should read this book carefully and really start discussing the upcoming downsizing project with your family and friends, and line up their support.
CHAPTER 2
THE UNEXPECTED JOY IN DOWNSIZING
Great art isn’t just the result of the brushstrokes you see on the canvas or the notes that reach your ear. The same is true of great writing: Far more goes into it than the words you read.
The genius you appreciate also comes from marks the artist didn’t make, notes the musician didn’t play, and words the author erased from the first draft.
This makes sense when you stop to think about it. It’s why one particular carving, more than all the others, catches your eye at an art fair and compels you to bring it home. Its creator envisioned a beautiful figure within the chunk of log, then removed wood from just the right places to reveal it.
But too often, we don’t apply this approach to the spaces that surround us. We mistakenly think that all empty space needs to be filled. We don’t appreciate that unfilled space can be beautiful and functional, too.
If your home is like most people’s, it probably contains half-completed projects that the kids abandoned a year ago, an old coffeemaker that you keep in the kitchen just in case you need it again, a broken printer that holds up the working printer, and gifts gathering dust in cabinets, still in their packages.
Such homes are filled with what I call un objects: things that were unwanted and unopened, that go unused, that are unappreciated or simply unnecessary. Our society encourages “more” as the normal default setting, even when it means more useless stuff.
If the surfaces in your home groan under the weight of objects you don’t treasure and value, I promise you this: The stuff you own is not only consuming a huge part of your living space, it’s also hiding large swaths of a different life that would provide more joy than the version you’re now living. A less-stressed, less-overwhelmed version of you waits in there somewhere, too, but you can’t see it.
Your mass of belongings—your “material convoy,” so to speak—is parked in front of a door that leads to somewhere better. But you can’t even find the door, let alone open it.
WHERE’S THE REAL YOU UNDER ALL THAT STUFF?
Always remember: The paper, plastic, electronics, wood, and fabric clogging the typical home has power because it’s not just stuff. Every item in your home is there because you have allowed it into your space. Each has a history, an associated memory, and a cost, though you may not recognize them.
Your stuff displays the characteristics about yourself you choose to value. It tells the world, “This is how I imagine myself. This is how I spend my time. This is what I dream about.” Your stuff may tell your story more eloquently than your words ever could.
* * *
New Phases in Your Life Need New Structures to Help Them Thrive
A second marriage (or third, fourth, or so on) comes with built-in challenges that can threaten its survival, notes psychologist Patricia L. Papernow.
Discussing these challenges in her book, The Remarriage Blueprint, author Maggie Scarf writes that “essentially, the remarried family’s difficult and completely unforeseen job is to leave behind many of their old assumptions about how a ‘real family’—i.e., a traditional, first-marriage family—is supposed to operate and get to work on self-consciously planning, designing, and building an entirely new kind of family structure that will meet their own unique requirements.”
The same holds true when you reach any kind of downsizing milestone that puts your life into a new format: retiring, losing your parents, or seeing your grown kids move out of the house (or, for that matter, move back in).
You can’t assume that the old structures in your life will support this new phase. You have to modify your customary ways of doing things and set up your home to be a physical structure that nurtures and encourages your new life. Ask yourself the following questions:
What sorts of new opportunities do I want to enjoy in the next phase