Category Archives: Downshifting

Imagine the Life You Want to Live

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Preparing to Purge: The staging area.

As a psychotherapist I spend a lot of time asking my clients to imagine what their lives would be like if they made the changes they want to make. I ask them to imagine themselves living this new and improved version of the life they have.  I’ve spent much time myself imagining the kind of life I would like to live in the future; where I would go, what kind of boat it would be on, what it will be like swimming in warm water and living where the sun shines. Being warm.

None of this prepared me for reading the question in Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, the book I’ve chosen as my guide for the Great Purging.  He asks people to imagine their ‘ideal lives’. When I imagine my ideal life, the dreams always seem to include leaving my home and going somewhere else. And that probably tells you something about me. But that’s not what Peter is after. Peter wants people to imagine the ideal way of LIVING in their Current Home! WHAT THE F..?  I never once considered that question in terms of HOW I am living in the home I currently own. It was a jaw-dropping moment  when that hit me, I assure you. I had to have a long bath in order to recuperate.

No one has ever accused me of being organized. Creative, yes. Free-thinking, yes. Attention deficit disordered, yes. Organized? Definitely not. It isn’t that I don’t try. I have invented more systems for getting our stuff organized than I can count. But they never seem to last. And now, thanks to brilliant Peter, I know why.  It’s because I’ve always been focused on “the stuff”, as he says. This man, in one simple paradigm-shifting part of his book, (the Introduction, for those of you who are reading along) completely changed the way I think about clearing out all the stuff that clutters up our lives.

He wants me to imagine things like being able to find my keys, having decent work flow in the kitchen, and being able to sit down to a meal at a table without clearing it off first. He wants me to imagine flat surfaces that exist for their own sakes, a closet where clothes can breathe and I can find things I like and that fit me. He wants me to imagine living in my house free of the stress that comes from having to constantly negotiate the amount of clutter just laying around all the time, with no real place of belonging. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about and wanted those things. It’s just that I have not actually imagined what it would feel like, or how it would ‘look’ if life flowed that way at my house.

Peter wants me to imagine what it would be like if I had been able to move into this house with intention, being thoughtful about where things go and how things are done and then keeping those systems in place. This is the opposite of our move-in experience.

Eleven years ago we moved into this house on a holiday weekend. The house was a ‘fixer’. The only updates it had were done by the previous home-owner who apparently had no idea what the term ‘square corner’ meant. And it was filthy. I mean it. When my kids took showers the walls in the bathroom leaked nicotine from all the years of the previous owners’ smoking. It was just disgusting. It looked like the bathroom was haunted. Every wall in the house needed to be sanded, sealed, and repainted, including ceilings. We had to demolish the family room (one of those home-owner specials) and have it rebuilt. We had the master bathroom enlarged and the kitchen updated.  I’m pretty sure our kids hated us for at least the first 6 months as we all slept together on the floor of what would be the family room. It was the only room I could get reasonably clean.

During the remodeling years, (yes, plural) our things got shifted from one room to another. We lived in the house one way, and then lived in it another way, until the remodeling was finished. By that time we had collected more stuff and still had no system for living in the house. Kids grew up, went to college, came home, left again. These are the times when systems should be able to flex and change to accommodate new patterns of living. But if you don’t have anything solid to begin with, it’s pretty hard to get it to be flexible without the whole system falling apart. My attempts at organization were futile. Now I see that part of the problem is that I was always focused on “the stuff” and where to put it in the tiny closets. According to Peter, this will not cut the mustard.

According to Peter, if you focus on the kind of life you want to lead, getting rid of the stuff in your way makes more sense. So, accordingly, my wedding dress is now hanging in the garage with loads of other ‘stuff’ that is in the way of my living the life I imagine. The dress is in good company with stuff like the old sealskin coat from the 1930’s that I bought for 15$ when I was in highschool, two sets of china that are lovely but that I’ve used maybe twice in 10 years, and funky American pottery planters from the 1940’s that I used to collect and that now collect dust.
But what about the cool old Villeroy and Bosch majolica plate with a gnome on it? I love that thing and it’s so… me! I know it’s not on display right now, Peter, but surely you have a heart? In fact, he does. The gnome collection stays, in part. Only the ones dearest to me. And they will be packed away in the tiny house in the attic.Since we’ve now begun this Great Purging as the first step in our cunning little plan, I now understand that I must strike a balance between the vision I hold for living in our current home, and the one I hold for our future life on the boat, and into our next land based home, wherever that may be. As I go through cupboards, closets, and drawers, holding these visions before me, I ask about each one: Does this help me live the life I want to live in my home now?  Does this item belong in the life I will live in the future? If the answer to both of those questions is no, out it goes. Peter would be so proud.

He's living the life he wants to live.

Pretending To Be Small

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Reading in the cabin of our tiny house, S/V MoonriseThere is a ‘small house’ movement afoot in this country. It’s incredible. Creative, brave people, mostly young people who will change this world, are leading the way living purposeful and fulfilling lives as they redefine the ‘American Dream’. You know that dream: the one about home ownership that turns out to be a nightmare for so many. I’m glad I’m alive to see this happen. These are people who are changing the rules that define ‘success’ in our country. Take a look at these sites if you want to get a taste of what is in store for the future of home ownership in this country: TinyHouseBlog.com, Tumbleweedhouses.com, TinyHouseLiving.com, ThisTinyHouse.com.

This is part of a larger movement to live more simply, with less ‘stuff’; like what you have to do when you live on a boat. In a way, it’s literally a counter-culture attitude that is 180 degrees from what constitutes ‘normal’ in our country. These people live in small spaces, with few things to weigh them down. I’ll bet they don’t shop till they drop, either. Sorry, Wall Street. It’s never going to be the way it was before. We all know it. Some of us are just better at saying it out loud than others.

We don’t live in a tiny house. We live in a 3000 square foot rambler built in 1964. It was the definition of the word ‘fixer’ when we moved in 11 years ago.  The only thing tiny about this house is the size of the closets. People just didn’t have the same level of stuff in 1964 that we have now. I’m pretty sure there were no Walmarts or Dollar Stores on every corner back then. If part of our plan is to rent out the house and live on a boat, we have a LOT of stuff that needs dumping first if we don’t want to spend money on some huge, ridiculous storage space. Which we don’t.

To that end, it helps to pretend that we’re going to be living in a tiny house. And this is true in more ways than you think. A boat is basically a tiny, floating house. Also, when we move to our final home, wherever that is, that house is going to be much smaller than this one, although the closets will definitely be larger.  Finally, although we plan to rent our house furnished,  we’ll want to store selected personal possessions in our attic while we’re away.  So we’ll pretend that the attic is a tiny house and that’s all the stuff we can keep.

In preparation for The Great Purging, I’ve been reading Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. Apparently this guy has had a TV show on which he helped people de-clutter their lives. Who knew? It’s not a bad book, really. As self-help books go, it has some meat to it. One of his main ideas is to focus on the life you want to lead, not on what he calls ‘the clutter’. And he gets into the emotional holds that ‘stuff’ has on people and how they get stuck in these emotional contracts with their possessions. As a psychotherapist, I can appreciate that. His idea is that every time you are confused about whether you should get rid of something, you should ask yourself whether that object helps you get closer to the vision of the life you want to lead. Pithy stuff. Halfway through the book I could envision myself tossing those old college yearbooks into the Goodwill box. Holy crap, Batman!

So with that in mind, I’ve created a staging area in (where else?) the garage. One corner is for stuff that is leaving this house forever, one way or another. One corner is for stuff that will fit in the tiny house in the attic. It will be packed and labeled. And one corner for stuff that my kids need to make a decision about, unless they want me to make the decision for them (said in the sternest possible ‘mother’ tone).

I enter this Great Purging with fear and loathing, but also with hope. I fear the moment when I will have to release the hold some sentimental item has on me. I loathe the fact that I have to spend all this time and energy sweeping things out of my life in order to create space both emotional and physical. And I hope that all those people who say that this process will give me a profound feeling of freedom and peace are completely correct.  Otherwise, this is really going to suck because we have some cool stuff and we’ve had a lot of it for a long, long time.

First….Get a Million Dollars

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First…. get a million dollars. That seems to be our favorite saying around here whenever Mike and I start dreaming about our little cunning plan to live the cruising life on board a sailboat. This is a saying that reflects the daunting task before us: to uproot our lives and set sail to exotic (we hope) locations before we get so old our teeth fall out. It seems like if we just had a ‘million dollars’ the distance between our lives now and the life we want to lead would almost disappear. Heck, with a million dollars we could probably set sail tomorrow! Well, almost.

We’re classic. Really, we are. Both in our early ‘50s, after 29 years of marriage, child rearing, home ownership, and careers, the wick of the proverbial ‘candle of time’ is getting short. Also, we’re sick and tired of working. And I mean that to be inclusive of all kinds of working, including keeping up with all the stuff that owns us like the house and gardens and all the detritus of an American life lurking in the garage, attic, and various other areas with closed doors. Don’t get me wrong. We’re part of the lucky few who really do enjoy their professions. It’s just that if someone walked up to us and gave us a million dollars today, we’d retire.So what makes this worthy of a blog? It’s not like this situation isn’t repeated ad infinitum in households of 50-somethings all over the USA. We’re no different than any other couple our age in that way. Except that we have a plan! Cunning it may be, but it’s, well, complicated. There are lots of steps and they are not as straight forward as all the self-help books lead one to believe.

Here’s the crux of the matter: In 4 years, when our son graduates from Western Washington University (knock on wood), we want to be in a position to rent out our home and set sail. It sounds easy, no? No. It does not. Like I said, it’s complicated. First, we have to ‘downshift’ our lifestyle: reduce the amount of stuff we have accumulated over 29 years. I understand this is a freeing experience. At this point, I take other people’s word for it.At the same time, we must prepare our home to be a rental. This alone may take the better part of the next 4 years as we make needed upgrades and finish projects that have been waiting around twiddling their thumbs.  We’re talking refinishing floors, replacing flooring in the office, finishing the tile in the laundry room. You get the general idea. Oh yeah, I forgot finishing painting the trim in the family room. This requires a ladder taller than what we already have, which is why it remains unpainted after 10 years.Then there is the choice of boat. This is where the million dollars would really be helpful. At this writing we are the proud owner of a 1976 Cal 34, SV Moonrise. She is a great boat. We love her. She is safe and sea kindly. She is stout of heart and her V berth is as comfortable as our bed at home. But she is not really our choice of boat for the extended cruising we have in mind. She is almost paid for, though, and we struggle with whether we should take the plunge and get something else now, or wait. More on that later. Suffice to say that I wax and wane about this, knowing that whatever boat we have, we’re going to be working on it and upgrading it. We can work on and upgrade the Moonrise for the next 4 years and then try to get something else we’re more comfortable with, or we can take the plunge and buy something else now and spend the next 4 years upgrading that. Did I mention that we have a kid in college?

So, again, why the blogging?  Mike’s a computer programmer so he’ll give his own answer to that. For my part, I got serious about thinking about it while reading the book Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously  by Julie Powell. The book describes how Julie makes a goal of working through Julia Child’s cookbook on French cooking by systematically creating every recipe in the book over a period of one year. What struck me, other than the sheer genius and insanity of such an idea, was the support she received from the followers of her blog. It kept her on track; it motivated her when she wanted to quit. Selfishly, I want that. I think.

I figure this is a good way to keep myself organized, set goals, and if I put those goals in print, follow through with them. Our little cunning plan is a complicated one and will take a lot of energy and direction. We need to carry on with it in a measured way, accomplishing one small task at a time. So this blog is entirely a selfish exercise on the one hand.

On the other hand, I have noticed that with few exceptions, people who make these kinds of huge life changes talk about them after they have accomplished their goals. (One notable exception is the Robertson’s blog Log of s/v Del Viento. Check it out.) There are plenty of interesting blogs written by people who are already living the cruising life. Lots of their stories are punctuated with the advice that one should ‘Go now! In the boat you have!’.  Thanks for that. Give me a million dollars and I’ll ‘go now’, but not necessarily in the boat I have. I get the point, but it’s not realistic for us.  I believe there are many, many more people who are like us and need to take some time to extricate themselves from long and fruitful land-based lives than there are who can drop everything and go. So I will write things I think will be helpful to others who are in our same ‘boat’.

So this blog will be a little bit of  this and that and more than a little about our love of all things sailing and boats. It sounds like it’s going to be all over the map but it’s really not. All of these things will be involved as we implement our Little Cunning Plan. Stay tuned.