Do you long for a simpler life? Unexpected lessons in letting go.
The Practice #3: Simplify
Welcome back to The Practice from The Slow Sip.
My goal with The Practice is simple - to share tools and practices to support you to live life at your pace, on your terms, pursuing the things that matter most to you.
While The Practice is an exclusive monthly offering for The Slow Sip’s paid subscribers, I begin each issue with an opening reflection that is available to all subscribers.
Reflect: Do I need it? Do I love it? Can I let it go?
“How much space do you think we actually use in this house?”
That was the question I asked my husband one evening over dinner.
It had been five years since our kids left home. And we were still living in our 2,800 square foot Cape Cod in suburbia.
After talking about it for few moments, we estimated we were using less than half the space. The rest was just overpriced storage. But we were stuck. The effort required to deal with a lifetime of accumulated stuff just seemed overwhelming.
We decided to have an exploratory conversation with a real estate agent. We both thought we were just testing the waters, but at the end of that conversation, we agreed to put our home on the market in 30 days.
And so began what I can only describe as the greatest and most stressful purge of our lives.
We subjected everything we owned to these questions: Do we need it? Do we love it?
If the answer was no, then we asked: Can we sell it? Can we give it away?
There are three memories from that time that stand out for me.
The last truckload of stuff.
As the last truckload of stuff we were not keeping pulled out of our driveway, I felt a visceral sense of lightness and relief. I had been unaware of the extent to which the clutter in our lives had been weighing me down.
The last walk-through our empty home.
Closing day. I walked through my home of twenty years for the last time. It was empty now, but I could still feel us in the barren rooms, the family unit we had been, all the amazing memories - joyful ones, painful ones and precious ones - we had created together. As I walked through alone, I said thank you to each room as I left it. I paused at the fire place where my oldest son and his new bride stood to say their wedding vows. I cried.
But I knew it was right. This house was about to become a home for a family of five children. I wasn’t giving up a home. I was releasing it to a new family. It would be brimming with life again. That thought gave me a profound sense of peace.
The first walk-through our new apartment.
Our new apartment was still under construction when we moved out of our house and wouldn’t be ready for about three months. The developer agreed to rent us one of his furnished apartments while we waited. That turned out to be a gift. It forced us to put our remaining belongings in storage.
I remember the thrill of our first walk-through the new apartment three months later. Before that, we had only seen plans. The floor to ceiling windows filled the apartment with sunlight. It was airy and spacious. The view was breathtaking.
I remember deciding in that moment that I wanted to be mindful of how we filled our new home. I didn’t want to lose this remarkable feeling of spaciousness and light. I wanted to begin as if we were starting from zero.
We decided we wouldn’t empty the storage unit and try to fit it all in. Instead, we took out only what we needed as we needed it.
To our surprise, we discovered we could live very happily on about 25% of what we had previously owned. We did not feel deprived or even inconvenienced. Life was simpler, easier.
That experience unfolded at a point of major transition in our lives and in the world. So much change - COVID and lockdowns, the birth of grandchildren, the sale of my business, my commitment to finally devote my time to writing.
Through it all, a new, more spacious rhythm developed in our lives. I loved it. It suited me.
The question became how to keep it that way. How to resist the relentless pressure to fill up my calendar with commitments. And to fill up our lives with stuff.
In his beautiful essay The Art of Closing Tabs,
says:…simplicity is not just a place we visit—it is a practice, a discipline, a way of being. It is the daily act of choosing what matters and releasing what doesn’t. It is the radical wisdom of allowing some things to remain unfinished, some messages to remain unanswered, some invitations to remain declined.
I have to admit, the practice of simplicity is a work in progress for me. My default is to complicate. Like many people, I struggle to say no. I underestimate how long things will take. I underestimate how much time I have. I overestimate how much stuff I need. I’m a sucker for bright, shiny, distracting things.
But I’m getting better at it.
I’m becoming more mindful of protecting my simple life. And it is paying massive dividends in the quality of that life.