Too Much Stuff? Sell, Share, Give!

Look around you. Are you surrounded by too much stuff? Open your closet. Pop open this cabinet. Peak in that corner. If you had it all burned down, flooded, taken away, or lost in a number of natural and man-caused ways, would you be unable to live without it?

I say, lighten your load. Gather it up. Give it up. Share it. Sell it. The 21st Century, if it is to be one of equality, will require those with too much stuff to learn to live with less. How we frame the LESS IS MORE story can be joyful.

Lessons while lightening up my life this month while I hosted 3 garage sales:

1. I assembled a box of desk organizers with 40 different tools for organizing a desk. The sign on the tote read $2 each, organize your life. A dad and his daughter showed up as I was closing my garage sale for the last day of #3. He was sort of rifling through the box. I could see him calculating in his head if he could find something useful. Too many tools were useful possibly. I interrupted his calculating and offered, "If you give me a $20 bill you can have the entire box." He jumped on it, and immediately declared "DONE!" He stopped looking through, grabbed the handles, stood up, and with a huge smile on his face, stood proudly as the new owner of a massive tote of paper sorters, clips, memo books, pen holders and pencil sharpeners, rubber bands, and reems of themed unopened papers, and dozens of ways of organizing stuff for his life. I recorded this happy guy grateful for reorganizing his life.
2. I am frustrated that I have so much knowledge about climate solutions and have not yet figured out how to share it sustainably. I am learning lessons personally along the way.
3. Going through stuffed files, I found this note shakily handwritten by my mom in the hospital two months before she lovingly removed her life support systems on Valentine's Day.

I am scared, too...for the health of Earth, for the future of our species during the 6th mass extinction. Is Earth on life support? None of us can possibly know what massive changes lie ahead. Earth is our life support system.

Being informed about the climate conundrum while we have our feelings of loss propels us into days of meaning and abundance. We need a massive reimagining of how we can store renewable energy. Public-private alliances might be spurred on by individual modeling. We need financing for these to execute visionary progress on climate net zero pledges. Can global cooperation happen at the speed and scale required? It may just come down to each one of us privately financing through our big companies and our individual demands.

I'm looking around and am relieved that the investment across our country, the USA, is incentivizing a rapid transition through the Inflation Reduction Act to a lighter electrified life. I look around my garage, surrounded by too many old school books, old computers, printers, CDs, VHS tapes, all the things that are already replaced by digital info systems. Smaller, more manageable, less physical material, and more virtual delivery are lightening my load.

My heart remains heavy for the way we have permitted our planetary home to be on life support systems. My mom removed her life support systems and transitioned expressing her love for her family. Is Earth removing life support systems for homo sapiens, along with all the other species blinking out when air/water/soil has been degraded by human causes at a speed and scale too rapid for evolution to adapt for life? Lightening up my life led me to find this note from my mom. I am both weeping and joyous for the slip of paper with her handwriting, a reminder of the strength, grit, and humor of my mother.

My mother was just one woman. Earth is just our only planetary home. Will homo sapiens be just another species at risk from unwillingness to transition from more to less? The 6th mass extinction is well underway. Global financing is falling short $3.5 trillion dollars annually from what is needed every year of this decade. Governments need to move rapidly, collaboratively, and innovatively. We need to understand there will be those with less who are impacted more. The transition internally is big emotionally. Homo sapiens are capable of using intelligence to be self-aware. Disinformation, misinformation, and unwillingness to adapt to risk delaying sufficient transition.

In divesting beautifully gathered gifts over these decades, this massive emotional lift is not without pain. My husband, son, and his 8 1/2-month pregnant wife have already moved on to Hawaii. I remain hunkered down in the garage letting go of so many beautiful reasons for hope of less being more. I celebrate a new story where less is happily more. I call for more of us to learn to live with less inequality.