The Slow, Steep Learning Curve of Letting Go

I was a faithless blogger. Over the past couple of years I have dropped posts into this blog willy-nilly, wandering around the terrain of unhouseholding like a prodigal daughter.

But recently I've had reason to return to this idea of letting go of material and emotional things. And finally I've been getting some clarity on the relationship between having less stuff while having more freedom.

It's painful to talk about the events that have brought me back to this blog. But maybe in talking about them, someone else will find help or solace or even inspiration. Or, at least I can hope for that.

Back in 2009 my divorce and the tumultuous events that led up to it was the first big letting go. I lost the husband but kept the 2000-square-foot house. It should have also been let go, but in my fear of losing stability, I clung to it.

In 2010, I lost my SUV on an icy bypass when another vehicle slid into mine (while the driver was texting, no less) and slammed it into an unforgiving cement highway divider. I was not seriously hurt, but I was frightened enough to replace the totaled SUV with another more crash-worthy one because I needed to feel safe.  

In both 2009 and 2010, I worked at two jobs because I needed the security to pay for the divorce and to keep the house. In the latter year, I lost one job because the company was acquired by a larger company. I quit the other, since it was part-time, to take a full-time contract job that had potential to become permanent.

In 2010, my father, who was athletic and healthy throughout his life, was diagnosed with both an abdominal aneurysm and a low-grade lymphoma that required chemotherapy for the next three years. My mother, who has had heart problems most of her life, had a second heart valve replacement. I let go of the idea of having at least one healthy parent.

Later the same year I started a wonderful relationship with a man whom I knew from high school. We started to plan a future together when he became ill with terminal cancer. I lost him in October 2011, after almost a year of watching him battle his illness. There was no replacing him. And there was no way to make myself feel secure after what happened.

This year,  there were a couple more lettings go. The contract job ended mid-summer with no chance of renewal. And my reliable boon companion for 10 years--Justice, White German Shepherd and Guardian of the Gates--took her leave last week due to an aggressive, fast-moving cancer. 

And during all of this time, I kept the kind-of big house, still believing that it would give me some sort of stability.

It hasn't. 

When I started this blog, I understood at an intellectual level the hazards of accumulating stuff, but I didn't know what it would take to move me at an emotional level towards action. I know now.

So this apparent litany of losses isn't laid out for you so that you will feel sorry for me at a distance. I simply ask that whoever reads this post to be a witness to my having had many things that I care about stripped away. 

In the past, I did so many things from a place of fear, and it was just delaying my unhouseholding process. I covered up my fear and pain with replacements and put on a demeanor that appeared to say all was well.  But it wasn't.

And, yes, letting go was painful and startling. But after the eardrum-bursting wake-up call comes the chance to begin again. This is where I'm at now. 

I invite you to check in with me form time to time as I work on becoming a more faithful blogger and unhouseholder as I continue learning more about letting go.

Long Time Gone

I looked at the last time I posted and, sheesh, it's been six months. A lot can happen in six months, and for me, it has.

Here's the laundry list of stuff (reely, not excuses) that's occurred since I last wrote, my dear readers:

• I started my Master's degree in Information Systems at Drexel (http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/).
• A dear friend of mine succumbed to terminal cancer--this took a great deal of time for me to process because of the good talks we shared during his illness.
• I left my part-time work in non-profit and took on full-time contract work in electronic records management.
• I learned a lot more about managing the household that I still plan to unhousehold from. (More on that in a future post).
• My girl Justi turned 12 in February (see photo;)
• I learned how to make my own peanut butter, grow my own sprouts, and experience other fun food creations (Content for future posts, I promise).
• I just went to a lecture on straw bale gardening (Future post in the works).

So, it doesn't seem like a lot but I guess it was more of a sea change. I became more resilient and more resourceful.  The process of figuring out how to be be more self-sufficient continues to give me courage. I'm still a householder who's still pursuing minimalism and independence...but I'm enjoying the process.

 And I want to take you along. Welcome back!

Justi sur la plage (Justi at the beach!)

The bittersweetness of last summer things

Coming home this evening, I stopped at a local flower grower and bought 10 sunflowers.

They are the last ones of the summer.  For two days now, I passed them, waiting in white gallon buckets under a roadside tent, on my way to and from work. I hesitated buying them, because it would be a tacit acknowledgement that the summer has moved on, and only its vestiges remain.  

Even so, I love fall. Every weekday, I've been driving the back roads to work and enjoying the gradual reddening of the trees, corn husks standing sentinel in the fields, and farm trucks loaded with beach ball-sized pumpkins. But here I am, reveling in these huge, solar blooms.


And as beautiful as they are, you're probably wondering what do sunflowers have to do with uncluttering and unhouseholding, right? I have to say that they remind of me of the transience of material things...just like the final flowers in October. 

The stuff that owns us is transient. We use it for a while and we wear it out or we give it away or sell it--or when all else fails, we dispose of it properly, I hope.

It doesn't really work in the big scheme of things to keep all of it, all the time. This is a big revelation for me. It isn't because I'm especially materialistic. I just didn't know how to let go of some stuff. But it's getting a little easier every day.  

I gave away a set of 25-year-old porch furniture recently.  I finally figured out that the only reason I kept it was because it used to live on the sunporch at my parents' house. When I would visit, I liked to fall asleep on the chaise lounge from the old set. But I don't do that on my own porch. Maybe I must have been trying to hold on to the memories through these white and yellow plastic chairs.

But since the summer's gone, so must go the old porch furniture. The transience of stuff finally makes sense to me, and clearing the clutter--and the fog of ambivalence around it--is becoming less difficult.


Thanks to Karen Kingston's Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui for prompting my thoughts for this blog.

3.5 Focal Points

I have a couple of new beginnings in my life right now: a new contract job and part-time graduate school. Time management is sometimes a big challenge for me: I want to take on too many activities, then I become overwhelmed and end up scrapping some of my projects.

This time around I decided to pare down the things that are important to me. Three and a half things is the number I've chosen to work with, especially after reading Ev Bogue's blog post Triangular Focus. I couldn't quite bring myself to stick with three, and four seemed like too much. So, why not 3.5?

Here they are:

• Work--leaving old job this week and expecting a relatively steep learning curve on the new one.
• School--two online courses in Information Science at the graduate level.
• Health--taking better care of my health and maintaining good health for my furry child, Justi. (See below.)  For both of us, it means regular exercise, adequate sleep, and eating well. Justi will help with maintaining perspective and balance:)

And my half-focal point? Creative pursuits and projects. At first, I winced at the idea of having a half-focal point, especially one that involved my writing and art projects. But I've come to realize that, right now, I need to provide myself with the livelihood that will give me the most freedom, ultimately. 

Yes, the half-focal point is a compromise, but it will also provide me with the incentive to make the best of the time I devote to creative work. And maybe-just-maybe, I'll make the time to do the work more meaningful in this way.

Next comes scheduling for the  big 3.5. I'll be using Google calendar and maybe some pie charts to help me visually understand where my time should be going. After all, when you take away all the physical and mental clutter, all we have is time...and each other.

Letting Go of Stuff in the Middle Ages

This isn't a post about the days of pre-Renaissance ruffians contributing to the Bubonic plague by tossing their refuse out of second-story windows. Sorry, but no.

This post is about getting rid of stuff collected over the years in my Middle Age...and perhaps yours.

While I very much enjoy reading inspiring posts from young bloggers, like Tynan's Life Outside the Box or Ev Bogue's evolution, it seems to me that getting rid of stuff for them is a far different process than for me. For example, Tynan placed an ad on Craigslist to invite strangers to come and take what they wanted from his house in the space of one day when he was ready to travel the world possession-free. Ev burned many of his belongings, and what he kept he was able to fit into a backpack.

Both are admirable ways of freeing oneself  from one's worldly goods in order to do one's life-work unhindered, but they are young people's ways of doing it.

Having accumulated a houseful of stuff over the years is a gradual process. It's true that every time I've moved over the past 20 years or so (maybe 8 or 9 times), I've shed some of my detritus and unnecessaries.

But much remains to be done-- and for me, it's really like peeling layers of an onion.  I try to focus on one area, like my bedroom closet by taking three 42-gallon bags of clothing to Goodwill or an armload of dresses to the local consignment shop. It's an organic process--in the coming months, I will be experimenting with various processes, such as 27 things in 9 days or filling one bag with unwanted items each week for a month to donate to charity.

The main thing for me is that the stuff in my house didn't multiply exponentially overnight, like mushrooms. It took years (ugh). And I don't want to leave it as my legacy. Time to work on it but also time to be patient in this gradual sloughing-off of many years' collection.

How about you? Do you kick extra stuff in your house to the curb immediately? Or, is it a steady release of unwanted items over time? Also: is a slow process only for those of us with more miles on the odometer?

Back to the old turf

I'm back. I doubt if I made a dent in the blogosphere the last time I posted. I apologize to anyone who wondered where I was for the past year.

If you're wondering why such a long hiatus, here are some reasons (excuses?):

I worked both in my non-profit job onsite and my ontology job offsite.  Family members with health problems needed help.  I fell into an awesome yet overwhelming long-distance relationship.  I spent lots of time thinking about this post and the ones that will follow.

And I decided to come back to my blog, because I want to share what I'm discovering with you.  I want to know what you think, too.

It's good to be back.  I hope you'll stick around.

The definition of unhouseholding

Unhouseholding (def.):  "To divest oneself of a household and its associated clutter in the pursuit of freedom, sanity, and simplicity."