Earlier this year we decided to sell our house and move someplace smaller and with less land. My house is the repository of possessions collected during our 30+ years of marriage and child rearing but it is also the final resting place for my in-laws things including my husband’s great uncle & aunt’s things.
We have been overwhelmed by the volume of stuff lately and honestly think that feeling contributed greatly to the decison to pare things down considerably. I have spent the last month sorting, packing and disposing of things, getting ready to paint.
I have taken everything off the walls, and cleared every horizontal surface. My home has never been more peaceful. I like it.
I wonder if the sense of lack of mobility may not mean that the possessions are beginning to own you instead of the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else that’s making you feel tied down??? For the past 20 years we’ve hauled more and more possesesions from place to place - never feeling a lack of mobility as we’ve gone from Midwest to West Coast to Colorado. You’re not shacked to stuff - it can all be sold or donated.
We’re downsizing big time. By this time next year we’ll have moved from a large house full of stuff to living aboard a sailboat. It’s an interesting process. There are a few things that will go into storage because we want them to be there if we come back, but these are things with emotional attachment rather than things of tangible value. I’ll store my family photographs, my keepsakes from when the kids were little and from my father. We each have some souvenirs of our past that will remind us of pleasant or significant times when we reopen the boxes some day in the distant future. Everything else goes.
It’s just stuff.
I know what this thread it titled. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the past few days. So why do I read it as “Sometimes I miss being tied down by material possessions”?
It happens every time I see the title.