Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,18
tend to be happier, healthier, and more productive to the degree they can bring others to see them as they see themselves.”
So displaying who you are through your possessions is a normal activity, though it’s possible to go too far in identifying yourself through your stuff. (I’m certain that I’ve spent more time convincing someone to part with a shirt than a surgeon might in discussing a major surgery with a patient before the operation.)
Second, we outfit the spaces in our home (and car and office cubicle) with so-called thought and feeling regulators. “Lots of objects in our spaces are there to make us feel a certain way. We’ve done research showing that people try to elicit different ambiances in their spaces. They may go to quite extensive lengths to do that, but they don’t always know that’s what they’re doing,” Dr. Gosling says. “They won’t be able to tell you that ‘I’m trying to evoke a sense of family here, relaxation there, or romance there,’ but that essentially is what they’re doing.”
It’s a bit like how you’ll choose the music for a particular activity. The playlist you’ll select for your workout is very different from the digital music TV channel you pull up during the holidays, which is different from the old-school music you rock out to on your way to your class reunion. Each will put you in a particular mood, which is why you choose it. But you aren’t necessarily aware that you’re deliberately changing your environment to steer your emotions.
Dr. Gosling and I agree that the objects we place around us affect us on an unconscious level. “Yeah, I think they absolutely do. But we really don’t have much self-insight into it,” he says. He has a special interest in the photos that people display of themselves. “I’ll ask, ‘Why do you have that photo?’ Often, they give me an uninformative answer: ‘I like it.’ I know! But why this one? There are 10,000 photos of you that exist in the world; how come this one made it? Often they’re not good about knowing why.”
So of all the thousands—perhaps millions—of objects that you’ve touched in your life, why did the objects now in your home stay there? Well, aside from all the reasons we’ve already discussed (they have a function, they have a memory attached to them, and they help you establish your identity), chances are they also comfort you in some way that you can’t exactly put your finger on.
You’ve radiated your personality into this environment, and it influences your mood. Signals travel back and forth between you and your home, and these signals are transmitted by the objects in each room. The moment you touch your stuff, you get closer to your emotions, especially if you’re downsizing. But you may not be fully aware of it.
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Real-World Downsizing Discovery
Tahnee says: I always joked I was a bit of a hoarder, as my mum and both grandmas were. It was funny until I was diagnosed with motor neuron disease at only 31 with two small children. I didn’t want everyone having to sort through “my precious stuff,” so I downsized. I had a happy ceremony going through my personal items from growing up that I knew meant nothing to anyone else and would be thrown out when I was gone. Then I let them go.
While sorting through them, I found lace handkerchiefs my grandma made me for my wedding that were in the bottom of a box with some damage from rats. I was so heartbroken that I hadn’t looked after them. So we cleaned them up and treated them with respect in a frame that I hung on a wall in a place of honor. We also made a pile outside of what I chose to throw out when downsizing. Anything that didn’t fit went on the pile. The kids were singing the “Let It Go” song as we burned EVERYTHING in that pile! I realized the time I had left was more important than any “stuff.” Downsizing by letting it go brought much more of a focus on what really matters.
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When you have this sort of relationship with the stuff in your home, of course it’s difficult to shed your belongings and move on. “Because we’re so unconscious about it, we don’t always know what we’re going to miss or what we aren’t going to miss,” Dr. Gosling says.
The first step is to recognize that your work begins before you