Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,3

keep the specific number to myself, thanks) that allows me to see that the busiest phase of my working life will someday come to an end. It’s not anytime soon . . . but it’s not the hypothetical scenario it was when I was 30.

Here’s what I have discovered, both from my own life and from so many other people’s stories. These milestones that mark a new transition can shake you to your core. They can leave you wondering what you did with your life and worrying about what comes next. “Have I made the right decisions so far? Am I making the right decision now?” you might ask.

But with these challenges comes a great opportunity to start anew—if you’ll just let yourself do it.

Releasing your possessions can be terrifying, because without them, who are you? When you do it well, downsizing will answer that question.

It will also provide many other gifts. One of these is relief. But too many people miss it because they’re squabbling with a sibling over a doll collection that neither really wants. Another gift of downsizing correctly is freedom. But too many people overlook it because they’re frantically loading a moving truck with dusty boxes that they’ll put directly into the attic of their next home.

Your life is changing, and you may or may not have asked for these changes.

But you now have the greatest opportunity that you will ever get to create the life you want. I want to help you make the most of it.

Ready to let go? Then let’s go!

PART ONE

The Powerful Benefits of Downsizing

Though many people have little trouble finding a reason to buy more, more, more stuff, marketers are always happy to give them another excuse to pull out their credit cards.

Consumers in China have embraced a new holiday: Singles’ Day, a celebration for people not in relationships, which falls on November 11. In one recent year, the nation’s equivalent of Amazon sold more than $14 billion worth of stuff on this day.

If Singles’ Day catches on in America and elsewhere in the near future, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. On the other hand, enough people are now seeing the value in a simpler lifestyle that puts less emphasis on stuff that I could also see a different type of holiday catching on: Downsizing Day!

We often stockpile stuff because that’s what society has taught us to do. Some of this stuff has “heirloom” status because our parents, grandparents, or an uncle whose name we don’t remember told us long ago that we needed to value it.

As you approach your own Downsizing Day, it’s time for you to take control of these decisions. Instead of buying new stuff you don’t need, you’ll let go of existing stuff you don’t need. Before you begin, I’d like for you to explore the big questions in this section:

Why should I let go of my stuff?

If I do let it go, am I ready to discover the real “me” underneath it?

CHAPTER 1

A NATION LOOKS FOR A PLACE TO PUT ITS TREASURES

At the moment, I’m looking at a piece of furniture on Craigslist that’s less than 10 years old but already looks like a relic of a long-gone, whimsically quaint era.

It’s a Mission-style oak entertainment center. At 12 feet wide and more than 6 feet tall, it entirely fills one wall of a living room. Its owner, who is trying to sell it for a fraction of what it must have cost, says it’s “solidly built” and “will last several lifetimes.”

I definitely believe it’s solidly built. But I’m skeptical about this “several lifetimes” part. I doubt many people would want this piece of furniture today, let alone 50 years from now! It was created to hold a massive, boxy television on its pedestal-like stand. Mighty towers at either side contain slide-out shelves to display CDs and DVDs. Remember those?

Backbreaking armoires and entertainment centers like this had their time in American homes, and that time was brief. Shortly after they became common in living rooms and family rooms, the technology they were designed to display began vanishing.

Flat-screen TVs became thin enough to hang from a wall like artwork. Dust-collecting stacks of CDs gave way to digital music that is stored on a smartphone. By streaming movies and TV shows over your home’s Wi-Fi signal, you can now live a fully entertained life without a DVD player.

As I write this, 311 other people in the Los Angeles area are also trying to unload their oak entertainment