A Beginning. . . . . Today I’m beginning this blog post because I can no longer not. My intention for it is for us over the next several months to explore the question “How will I know when I have enough?” And to have each of us wrestle with the question, along with others […]
What Could Be Good About Downsizing? Getting to Enough.
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com What’s Good About Downsizing Your Home? It Could Be Getting to Enough. As my regular readers know, last year I went through a major downsizing of my large home and moved into a very small apartment. It was hard. At times, very hard. I even wrote a book about it called […]
The Hardest Part of Downsizing: Letting Go of Treasured Things
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com The Hardest Part of Downsizing: Letting Go of Treasured Things The question I hear most often when I’m talking with people who are in the middle of a major downsizing or are getting ready to downsize is, “How can I get rid of things that are very, very important to me?” […]
Downsizing Your Home: The Discomfort of Uncertainty
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com Downsizing Your Home: The Discomfort of Uncertainty The only thing in life that’s certain is that nothing in life but death is certain. Now that’s not very comfortable for most of us. We tend to be most comfortable living with the illusion of certainty. I think one of the things that […]
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
I live in the middle of Silicon Valley where some of the richest companies in the world have their headquarters. There are thousands of millionaires, and in 2018 there were a reported 74 billionaires. There was a story recently on the news about how the board of a local very popular college was trying to […]
Staying Downsized: Always Having Just Enough
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com Downsizing your home is one thing. Staying downsized is an entirely different thing. You’ve gone through the incredibly hard process of downsizing your house to a smaller place, maybe a much smaller place. You’ve moved, organized things, and figured out just where to put everything you took with you. And if […]
Downsizing Your Home After 60: Don’t Let Change Keep You From Living the Life You Want
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com Everyone resists change… Change is very hard… Real change takes a long time… We hear things like these all the time. Are they true? Well, maybe and maybe not. Like lots of things, “It depends.” Change Is Everywhere There are some big changes we make on a dime, like setting the […]
The Importance of Humor While Downsizing Your Home
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. Mark Twain in “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” Does this sound impossible to do? How can I […]
Downsizing Your Home: One Small Step at a Time
Originally posted on Sixtyandme.com A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.From the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu From my experience I think a major downsizing of your home can seem like an even bigger undertaking than a thousand mile trip. Give me a choice, and I’ll take the trip! Last […]
Struggling to Manage Your Home? Downsizing Could be the Answer
Originally posted on Sixty and Me.com “What do I want to do with my life?” That’s an overwhelming question. When I think of asking myself that question, all kinds of things pop up: How do I know? Who knows? If I knew that, I’d be doing it. It’s too big to even think about. Along […]
Why Do I Keep Accumulating Stuff?
Originally posted on www.sixtyandme.com Simplifying, downsizing, decluttering. . . these topics seem to be very popular right now. Why is this such an issue for so many people? When I went through a major downsizing last year, one of the things I learned was that I needed a very small percentage of the things that […]
Downsizing Your Home: Getting Ready to Live
I had just finished a book reading at a local bookstore, and the first question came from a man who was sitting toward the back of the room. He said that he had begun a “small downsizing,” and that the first question he got from a neighbor was “Are you getting ready to die?” Everyone […]
Downsizing Your Home is Easier When You’re Facing the Right Direction
Originally posted on www.sixtyandme.com Over the weekend, I was riding my bike to one of my favorite coffee shops, which is only about 10 miles away, so it’s usually an easy ride. But on this day, the wind was blowing “like spit,” as my grandmother used to say. (Do you ever think about things people […]
The Upside to Downsizing – How You Can Love Life With Less
Originally posted on www.sixtyandme.com While sorting through my inbox, I came across one email with the subject line “Loving Life with Less.” Given my interest in downsizing, I was very excited to read it. Yes! I thought. That’s exactly the goal. And then I began to think about how that really felt, and I wasn’t sure that it […]
Getting Ready to Downsize Your Home? Declutter Your Feelings First
Are you about to begin downsizing your home or beginning to think about it? I went through a major downsizing of my home last year. It can be an exhausting process physically to get rid of 60-70-80% of what you own. I found it really helpful to hire a professional downsizer. She was invaluable in […]
Reevaluating What’s Important as You Downsize Your Home
Last year I went through a major downsizing of my home. Are you preparing to do this? Are you thinking it may soon be time? For many of us, going through this process can be difficult and even painful at times. It certainly was for me, as I’ve discussed in my book The Upside of […]
The Importance of Friends in Downsizing Your Home
I went through a major downsizing last year. I wouldn’t have made it through without lots of help from my friends. The very first actual step I took toward what would become a four-month downsizing process was accepting my friend Lynn’s offer to help me do whatever I needed to get done on a chilly, […]
I Am Not My Things
Downsizing your home. For some of us this is a daunting prospect. And yet, it is something that many, many of us will face at some point in our lives. I faced it some time ago, and have chronicled many of my emotional experiences in my book called The Upside of Downsizing: Getting to Enough, […]
What Does “Getting to Enough” Mean?
My book, The Upside of Downsizing, has the subtitle Getting to Enough. For several years I’ve been concerned about what seemed to be our increasing greed, our need for “stuff,” and replacing what’s really important in life with “things” or with constant activity or with an unrelenting drive to make more and more money. I […]
The Upside of Downsizing: Getting to Enough
Downsizing my home from 2000 square feet to 800 — this was the challenge I faced last year, which sparked my new book The Upside of Downsizing: Getting to Enough. What does this title mean? At the beginning of last year I realized that I was going to have to sell my fairly large house […]
Is This Enough? Is This?
I have written before about the outrageous salaries being paid to some of those in charge of large public companies and the impact on our society as a whole caused by the disparity between their pay and those of the workers within those companies. In the May 28, 2017, issue of The New York Times, […]
Is My Stuff Part of Me?
I’m in the middle of what feels like a huge downsizing (more on that another time). If anything brings into sharp focus the question we ask ourselves when working with the Sign of Enough– “How will I know when I have enough?” — it is going through a huge downsizing. What I recommend to everyone, […]
What Does It Mean to ‘Be Content?’
“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” The above quotation is from Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher writing in the 6th century BCE, and the presumed founder of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching. When […]
We Must Stop the Growing Economic Gap
For the past couple of years at this time there has been news of the ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor. And each year the numbers get worse. This year Pan Pylas writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on January 17th said “The gap between the super-rich and the poorest half of the […]
Now Is The Time
On Saturday, October 15, 2016, an Op-Ed column by Roger Cohen appeared in the New York Times. In it Mr. Cohen related an encounter between a white (presumably) man and Veronica Zuleta, a Latina woman originally from El Salvador, who has been a US citizen for more than 10 years. While standing in line at […]
It Is Time to Step Up
Enough. Over the weekend I decided that I had had enough. Enough of my complaining about Donald Trump. Enough of my whining about Hillary Clinton. Enough of my saying that if Elizabeth Warren were running, I would sprint to the voting booth. Enough. I said to myself, “Self, either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is […]
My Recent Interview in the Thriving Women in Business Magazine
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for the Thriving Women in Business Magazine with Caterina Rando. In this interview, I discuss how to know when you’ve had enough and what exactly is the Sign of Enough? It could be anything from enough stuff, enough work or enough money. Enjoy!
Sign of Enough in South Bay Accent Magazine
Several months ago I got a call from Pam Marino, a writer for the magazine South Bay Accent. Pam was interested in meeting with me to talk about my work with Sign of Enough. I admit I was slightly surprised because my sense of South Bay Accent is not that of a magazine that would […]
A Curious Time
This is such a curious time we’re living in. Maybe that’s always true, but it seems particularly true right now. While I was driving to my office this morning, an interviewer on the radio asked a conservative columnist for the Washington Post if she thought the Republicans wanted to lose the election. What?? Can you […]
Let’s Begin
Recently Tim Cook the CEO of Apple was interviewed on 60 Minutes by Charlie Rose. In response to a question from Charlie Rose Mr. Cook said that the notion that his company is avoiding taxes on overseas profits is just “political crap.” Mr. Cook explains that he would love to bring all the money home, […]
Who Gets to Decide?
Among the “knotty problems” we have right now is that of – Who gets what medicine? And who should pay for it? And should any medication cost $1,000 a day or $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment? (That is the often reported cost of Sovaldi, Gilead’s hepatitis C pill.) And if, as apparently is […]
Getting It Right
I’m very aware that much of what I write sounds critical of the United States. I can imagine someone might say “If you dislike it so much, why don’t you live somewhere else?!” The fact is that I love this country. . .I just think that given how basically good we are with the resources […]
Life is Enough
Recently I was at a conference. Heroically, I felt, I got up very early and went to the gym in the hotel and worked out before the meeting started. Before returning to my room, I stopped in the coffee shop in the hotel to pick up a cup of coffee. A lovely young woman waited […]
Who is Responsible?
Over the weekend while driving somewhere, I was listening to the radio. There was a story about a man who had been an employee at one of the large financial institutions partially held responsible. . .at least by the general public. . .for the financial disaster earlier in this decade. He had been charged with […]
One Step at a Time
In 1968 at an election rally at the University of Kansas Robert Kennedy said that the then current Gross National Product of the US was just over $800 billion dollars. He went on to say that that GNP also includes air pollution and jails and nuclear warheads and armored cars for police. . .however . […]