A Fresh Start for 2025: Finding New Freedom by Downsizing and Decluttering

It’s the new year, time to start fresh, making resolutions for changes that contribute to our well-being. One way to do it is to make peace with our possessions and remove the unwanted clutter from our lives. In addition, as we get older, we often need to downsize.

When my 93-year-old father died in January 2020, my sisters and I dismantled our parents’ home where they had lived for half a century. That year, I resolved to make things easier for my children. Soon, I realized that decluttering my life was more than a one-shot process. It was a lifestyle, and it was empowering, even liberating.

Where to Start?

The good news is that there are great resources to help you. The most well-known is Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant, who said, “The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life,” offering six commitments:

• Commit yourself to tidying up. Starting with a commitment will help you eliminate the feeling of overwhelm.
• Imagine your ideal lifestyle: Consider the life you want to lead and make your home a space that reflects how you want to live.
• Finish discarding first: Removing unnecessary items will help you organize the things you want to keep.
• Tidy by category, not location: Instead of going from room to room, focus on specific categories like clothing, books, papers, and sentimental items.
• Ask yourself if it sparks joy: Take each item and only keep it if the answer is yes.

Margareta Magnusson, author of The Swedish Art of Ageing Well and Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, says that once you have “unburdened by baggage (emotional and actual),” you can dedicate your life to valuing each day, the challenging moments, and the many joyful times. She describes removing or redistributing items as uplifting rather than overwhelming, writing about death and dying in hopeful and sometimes funny ways.

Another resource is Rachel Kodanaz’sFinding Peace, One Piece at a Time. Kodanaz describes the spiritual aspects of honoring beautiful memories and the power of special possessions in ways to keep our loved ones with us while not accumulating too much.

Making These Ideas Work for Me

I purposely listed resources at the beginning of this blog because we each need to find our unique approach and don’t need to follow the suggestions to the letter. I hope my personal examples can help you feel more connected to the process of downsizing and decluttering.

Keeping Accumulation Down

When we moved into our small home with three children 35 years ago, I was forced not to accumulate too much. We converted the garage into my office, so there was limited storage space. As our kids moved out, we asked them to take their “stuff” with them. Yet, it is incredible how things continually pile up.

While regularly donating clothing, books, and dishes, I accumulated old receipts, voided contracts, and useless financial documents. Recently, I filled eight garbage bags with documents that were too sensitive for home recycling bins! I was careful not to dump the deed to my home or pink slip for a current vehicle. Watching each bag go through the shredder at a local facility left me feeling lighter!

Books, Books, and More Books

Following Kondo’s suggestion to keep items that give joy, I had to face my love of books. Over the years, mountains of books piled up on top of packed bookshelves. So, I organized my books by category. In the living room, I kept unique books and family photo albums. In my office, I kept professional books used for writing and another bookshelf with family history and journals.

On a smaller shelf, my little collection of children’s books had been saved for my grandchildren. Reading them to my grandchild is special. The rest I regularly donate. Even those in less-than-perfect shape that I place in the little free book boxes around my neighborhood. When the time comes (hopefully not too soon), I plan to find places to donate my professional books and any family history materials my children may choose not to keep.

What to Do About Inherited Items

As you might imagine, dismantling my parents’ home during the pandemic was emotional, with so many things that bring back memories. I decided not to keep anything that would clutter my home. My father, a Jewish cantor, had a huge collection of Jewish books and an archive of music, including reel-to-reel tapes of his voice.

Finding places for them was not easy during the pandemic. Many places turned me down, but I persisted. The University of California’s Jewish Studies department accepted 17 books, and a bookseller took the rest. I was very excited to donate seven boxes of tapes to the Jewish Music Association, which had an archive of cantors of the 20th century. It was harder to figure out what to do with the art.

During the 1920s, my grandfather collected art from budding German artists who became famous. He managed to get the art out of Germany before the Nazis forced him to flee. After these works of art traveled across oceans of time and history, how could I think about letting go of any of them? But we had to.

My sisters and I kept a few and donated the others. It was painful but healing as I turned the experience into an adventure. I researched the artists and created a database with links to their stories. I even befriended the daughter of one artist.

What About You?

How have you sorted through all your possessions and kept the ones with meaning for you? Do you have any tips? We can learn from each other!