In 2012, I embarked on what was to become a life changing experience.
I downsized my life. I needed to begin again, and in order to do that, I needed to process my life up to that point.
Part of how I did that was to begin a process of forensically examining my possessions, as a means to understand where I was at. I had walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela the previous Winter, I walked with just a rucksack and a bâton, beginning in St. Jean Pied de Port and arriving in Santiago 35 days later. I carried very little, a micro towel, a couple of t-shirts, a few socks, underwear, a borrowed sleeping bag and rain gear, toothbrush and my notebook, an essential item for me. The journey provided me the space and time I needed to process vast avenues of my life to that point. I had the space to interrogate who I Am now, where I’ve come from and what is really important to me in this Life.
With few possessions, and realising along the way that I wasn’t actually missing any thing that I owned back home, I began to ask myself the question:
“What do I really need to live here & now?”
I came home to a house that was closing in on me, for various reasons, some financial, some spiritual. I looked at all the stuff everywhere, all the things I had accumulated throughout my life to that point, and wondered what it was all for. It felt stagnant, like nothing was moving. After walking the camino, I felt on a visceral level that movement was crucial, stagnation was the enemy of all growth and change. All the stuff was restricting the flow in my life. I had accumulated a whole heap of books, some of them really good too! But I’d either read them already or was never going to read them; I had clothes that I’d worn on significant occasions but would never wear again, or that didn’t fit me anymore; I had almost every piece of paper that I had ever written on, all my notebooks and calendars, notes from college, letters both business and personal; a whole heap of household items like duvets/covers/towels/sheets/blankets. I’d kept almost every ticket stub for every event I’d ever attended. The images below will give some sense of the levels and layers and variety of stuff I was holding onto.
I started to realise that I was keeping all of these things to prove that I was here, that I had a life. But my life after the Camino no longer required me to prove I was alive, I knew I was, I was learning on another level who I Am.
I looked around the house, room by room and wondered what I would ever need of all of this stuff for. Was the house and all its multitude of contents serving me, or was I serving it?
With the new emerging awareness of my discoveries on the Camino I felt a sense of waste about it all. Presses packed to bursting, although everything neatly folded. Shelves dipping in the middle from the weight of books and papers, boxes everywhere. I had a fondness for little boxes each one full of little things, precious things perhaps but what I saw now was waste and the futility of holding on to these things. Stuff was suffocating me, my life was stagnating underneath it all. I walked from room to room really asking myself the question again:
What do I need to live here and now?
I have found that this question has become an ongoing life practice, there’s no definitive answer to it! The answer changes all the time, sometimes on an hourly basis. But asking the question, really asking it of myself leads me to tangible solutions to whatever is going on for me at the time. It’s an ongoing journey, the practice of letting go, the movement out from the centre in an ever increasing spiral of life and recovery. An important aspect of that recovery for me was in the practical lived ritual of Project Downsize.
I had an instinct to document the process, although at the time I wasn’t sure why. In retrospect, I was probably trying to figure out what was going on for me, and taking photographs, scanning papers, and really looking at all the stuff was a way for me to process the change I was about to embark on. A huge part of my personal Project Downsize became “Gifting” – it became a sort of Living Will, but in an extremely joyous way. Because of my personal circumstances, I needed, and wanted at that time, to reduce my personal possessions to fit in a rucksack. With two small storage boxes filled with my notebooks which I stored in my brother’s attic. Some of my most precious possessions were pieces of paper people had given me, more boxes of course, accumulated keepsakes, and some family jewellery too. Most things I had were of little financial value, but huge emotional value to me at that time.
Gifting was about looking at my really precious items and finding new homes for them. Preciousness, like most things, is in the eye of the beholder. I needed to understand the changing dynamic and relationship I had to these things. Objects can be imbued with significance, sometimes more than they actually have, or that significance can change over time. I felt obliged to find the right homes for some of these things, and to create a ritual for the items that couldn’t be passed on so that I could let them go. I started to write letters to people telling them why I was giving them the particular object, where I had gotten it, what it meant to me and why they were the person I had chosen to receive it, as well as more personal messages too, about what they meant to me in my life. In each letter I outlined very carefully that they didn’t need to keep the gift if they wouldn’t find use for it or derive JOY from it and I wrote:
It’s about ABUNDANCE, enough for everyone, without waste.
And signed each one:
Wishing you LOVE & ABUNDANCE & JOY
In doing this, I began to wish that for myself too. I began to feel ready, to feel the pull of the future and an optimism about what was coming next. I started to feel like it was okay to get excited about it, to begin to embrace this process. I was beginning again, again. It was time to
Let it all go, out into the world
To be used
Valued
I began to realise that I had been aiming for a different life then.
The process of Project Downsize was a period of intense self reflection and reassessment of my life and how I was living it, it culminated in my choosing to give away everything that I owned, keeping only what I need to live here and now. It may sound extreme. It was of its time in my life, and there were practical and financial issues which impacted on my reasons to take it to these lengths. But I don’t regret it, and so far I haven’t ever missed any thing for more than a moment of the stuff I let go of. It wasn’t always an easy process, there were various phases before I managed to let go of my most precious things. Or the things that I thought were precious and irreplaceable at that time. I needed to spend time in the examination phase, to really comprehend everything that I had accumulated up that point, what each item meant to me, and why I was holding on so tightly and to the detriment of how I really wanted to be in the world. I’ve learned, in some way, the answer to the question:
“How do you let go?”
and the answer
“Absolutely!”
Again, this is a practice, it’s ongoing and will probably form part of my personal learning and discovery for the rest of my life. I continue to practice letting go in my life since the turning point of Project Downsize and the Radical Transformation that it created within myself and how I live. I try to be mindful of things piling up, of accumulating clothes that I don’t need, I recently learned the O.H.I.O rule reading Maureen Gaffney’s book “Flourishing” and this has become another life practice:
Only Handle It Once!
It’s not always easy, and inevitably in a life being lived relatively fully with various liaises and activities, things can pile up. But for me a practice is both a physical and metaphysical engagement with an intention, how I manifest that intention changes and evolves as my needs for living do. It’s about LOVE & ABUNDANCE & JOY, not rigidity or punishment. My lived experience has shown me that keeping things moving, passing things on, donating unused/unwanted items to charities or other suitable organisations leads me towards Abundance. It helps me to feel part of the communities I interact with. By sharing what I have, I receive what I need in Abundance. I try to be mindful as my needs change, exchanging one item of clothing for another, what I buy, borrow and covet, as a means to understand myself, my life and how I want to live it. It’s about potential, both personal and social, trying to relate ethically to the world as a shared collective space.
Everything is connected.
