country for a new job, what will you do in your spare time? Create a shrine to your old home, where you can sit and pine away for your old friends and reminisce about how your old job was easier?
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Possessions Make Millions Reluctant to Move Later in Life
Since the early 1990s, an ongoing research project called the Health and Retirement Study has been collecting information from middle-aged and older Americans.
In 2010, the study asked participants about their possessions. Sixty percent said they had more belongings than they needed. (I’d suspect that a much higher number of people truly have more than they “need.”)
Another question included in the survey revealed the stress that people feel about downsizing: “Think about the effort that it would take to move your belongings to another home. How reluctant to move does that make you feel?”
Thirty percent said they were “somewhat reluctant.” Nearly half—48 percent—said their pile of possessions made them “very reluctant” to move.
“Well, 78 percent of people over the age of 60 say they have reluctance about moving because of dealing with their things. Multiply that times the number of Americans who are over the age of 60, and you have about 45 million people who have this on their minds,” says David J. Ekerdt, PhD, a downsizing-late-in-life expert from the University of Kansas.
So let me ask you the same questions: What thoughts are on your mind about downsizing? How reluctant are you to move possessions to a new home? What’s triggering your foot-dragging? Is it the physical challenge of picking up and packing all that stuff? Is it the sense of having your life in upheaval until you’re resettled? Is it because change is scary? Or does the idea of parting with some of your familiar possessions feel unsettling?
If you have that sense of reluctance, don’t keep carrying it around. Take a closer look at it, figure out where it’s coming from, and take steps to address it.
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If you’re getting married for the first time, what will you bring to the home? The toys from your childhood through early adulthood, your neon bar sign, the furniture you bought with an old boyfriend? If you’re getting remarried, will you jam the contents of two homes side-by-side into a new house so tightly that there’s barely room for the marriage license?
When your final parent passes away, what kind of unity will your original family preserve after you divide up your parents’ belongings? Will you and your siblings drift apart now that mom and dad aren’t around to pull you together at holidays? Will fighting over their heirlooms be your last act as a family?
These are the kinds of scenarios that can await downsizers when they:
Load their boxes in a hurry
Fail to stop for a moment to think
Don’t look within themselves and at the spots in their relationships that need repair
Don’t let go of the past
Hold on to things out of a sense of obligation or misplaced family responsibility
Don’t open themselves up to future possibilities
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Downsizer Honors Departed Loved Ones but Leaves Space for Her Own Life
Over a short period of time, Debra Clements brought so many of her family’s possessions into her home that her own life began disappearing.
Her older sister, who was dying of cancer, would frequently make requests such as “I’d like you to have this. Everytime you wear this top or everytime you use these plates, think about being with me.” So Debra kept them. When her sister asked Debra to take boxes of other items to the donation center, she kept those, too.
Ten months after her sister died, her mother took a fall and soon passed away.
Around this time, Debra moved to a new home. “I had all my mother’s stuff and my sister’s stuff, and I started to put it all on display in my new house, but thought, ‘Nothing here is me. I’m just rebuilding my mother’s lounge room’ [living room in Australian]. I also realized, ‘What I’m doing is re-creating my childhood, and for someone in her midfifties, that’s probably not a good spot to be in.’”
The death of yet another loved one—a close friend named Peter—led Debra to the breakthrough that she didn’t need a lot of stuff to remember those who’d gone. Though Peter had wanted Debra to keep his collection of hatpins, she wasn’t allowed to have them.
“I was really devastated. I held on to that a long time with resentment. Then a friend pointed out how unvaluable stuff is.