It's All Too Much

by Peter Walsh

  We become so focused on holding on to our clutter that we are unable to be truly present and live our lives fully in the right here and now. Wanting to be prepared for the future is a wonderful thing, but not when it so preoccupies us that we forget that the only time we really have is today. If we are not present in our lives, days pass in which we are barely conscious of what we have and what we can achieve. If our focus is constantly on what might be, we lose the present and the present, like it or not, is the only thing we have.

  Most things that you save for the future represent hopes and dreams. But the money, space, and energy you spend trying to create a specific future are wasted. We can’t control what tomorrow will bring. Those things we hoard for an imaginary future do little other than limit our possibilities and stunt our growth. When I urge you to get rid of them, I’m not telling you to discard your hopes and dreams. It’s actually quite the opposite. Because if you throw out the stuff that does a rather shabby job of representing your hopes and dreams, you actually create room to make dreams come true.

  Excuse #2: “It’s Too Important to Let Go.”

  We hold on to our possessions because we believe they’re important—to ourselves, to others, to our family, to our dreams, or to our own personal story. We define this importance in lots of different ways.

  Sentimental value

  Do you hold on to stuff because “it reminds me of the past”? Do you worry that in letting go of an item, you will have to let go of those memories? Has the line between the memory and the object itself become blurred? Are you afraid that if this painting, or this pile of mildewed photos, or this stack of crayon drawings is gone, you will lose that part of your past forever?

  Family history

  If you’re the designated family historian, you’re the one in charge of keeping the family legend alive. You don’t feel like you have the right to get rid of the “family mementos” because they weren’t given to you, they were entrusted to you. You are now responsible for what happens to them.

  If these items are supposedly so important, the question is: How are you treating them? Are your “family heirlooms” hidden in your cellar? Are they taking up space in your closet? Does the place this “important item” holds in your life truly reflect the value you claim it has? Those who know me, or have seen me in action, know that this is an area in which I am merciless. Don’t tell me something is important, has personal value, or is a family heirloom if it’s covered in dust, lost in a pile of clutter, or buried somewhere in your garage. If you value an item, you need to show it the honor and respect it deserves. Otherwise, it has no place in your home. No discussion, no negotiation—it goes! Either you value something or you do not. You have room for something or you do not—it’s that simple. If we each had a palace, we’d have infinite space in which to cherish and display our prized possessions. Maybe you’d devote a whole room to the porcelain figurines you inherited from your grandmother. But most of us don’t live in palaces, far from it. You can’t own everything so you have to pick and choose. The value you say an item holds for you must be reflected in the place you give that item in your life, otherwise your words have no meaning and the object is little more than clutter.

  Personal achievements

  Some of the clutter I see comprises souvenirs from major achievements, often years past: the boxes of college term papers that you labored long hours over, the drawers full of your child’s schoolwork that marked his/her intellectual growth, the walls of trophies from your years of high school golf tournaments. While there is definitely a sentimental component to this clutter, it is usually much more about the sustained effort, the hours of practice, the brute strength, or the personal sacrifice that went into reaching a specific goal. Part of you is afraid that if the item is lost, so, too, will the sense of achievement and even the effort that was required so long ago.

  Clutter makes us forget what’s really important. You’re sentimental, you value your family history—these are great things. But at times they come at great cost. I’ve worked with families who haven’t had visitors enter their homes for years because they’re so embarrassed by the clutter. In one home, the nine-year-old daughter had never had a single meal at the dining room table because for her entire life, it had never been cleared of the paper clutter that covered it. You think she’d ever had a friend sleep over? Or knew what it was to have pride in her home?

  The letters that appear throughout this book are some of the many e-mails and notes I receive almost every day. In some cases I’ve changed names or stripped away identifying details but the sentiments are genuine and the people who have expressed them are real.

  DEAR PETER:

  I’ve never confessed this out loud, but our apartment is so cluttered that we haven’t had friends or family over in years. The very notion of letting anyone see what’s behind the front door is too embarrassing to imagine. Even worse, I never let our three sons have friends over. Clutter has gotten in the way of our happiness as a family and our ability to socialize. Why do we have all this stuff? It just makes us anxious and angry.

  Sarah and Rob are the parents of three beautiful children, the youngest of whom is now five. When I met them, their bedroom was a disaster zone. There were dressers stuffed with outgrown babies’ clothes and one whole corner was occupied by a beautiful but now unused bassinet. Rob had tried repeatedly to get Sarah to discard some of the babies’ clothes, but she just wasn’t able to do so. They didn’t intend to have any more kids, so I wondered why they still had the bassinet and other items suited for a newborn. This was a classic situation of the problem not being about “the stuff.” I found that the root of the problem was uncovered with one simple question. I asked Sarah if her best memories with her children were in front of her or behind her. Her eyes welled up with tears; here was a woman afraid that the best times had already passed. She was holding on for dear life to those things that evoked the great memories she had had with her children, a scary thought, for sure. The only way to find out what the present holds is to actually live it; clinging desperately to the past seriously endangers your enjoyment of the present. If you let your sentiment overrun your house, you’re inhibiting your family’s ability to have a life worth preserving. Ironic, isn’t it?

  If something is important, give it a place of importance. Find a way to respect and display that memory. If you’re not treating it with honor and respect and you can’t find a way to do so, then get rid of it.

  Excuse #3: “I Can’t Get Rid of it—it’s Worth a Lot of Money.”

  The hardest clutter to get rid of is that which has the greatest perceived value. I’ve seen closets hosting a ton of clothes still with their tags attached, garages full of unused tools, brand-new Rollerblades under a bed, kitchen cabinets exploding with still-in-the-box yogurt makers and bread machines. You paid good money for those skis! Sure, you busted your knee and haven’t hit the slopes in years, but what if your son wants them one day? What about that broken TV? You’ve got a new one in the living room, but you never took this one in for repair. You spent good money on this stuff, so you hold out hope that you can eke some value out of it. Holding on to the item feels like holding on to the money you spent—somehow. But these items have lost their usefulness. The TV doesn’t work. You never took up Rollerblading. You’ve been planning to sell that antique chest for years. Now you’re throwing good space after bad money.

  Clutter robs us of real value. I’m the first to admit that it cost you good money to buy all the stuff you don’t use, but think about what it’s now costing you to hold on to it. Think about how much you pay for your house in rent or mortgage. Every square foot of your house is costing you money. So if you have a spare bedroom that is full of clutter and unusable, you’re wasting a good portion of your monthly housing expenses on that inaccessible room every single month! Is that room worth the “storage fees” you’re paying? Is that a sensible way to use that space?

  Think of the other ways in which you are
paying for the things you have in your home. It would be relatively easy to calculate how much you spent on what is now clutter filling your home, but maybe there’s a more important question: What is that clutter now costing you in ways far beyond the initial financial outlay? In stress? In your health? In your relationships with your family members? In embarrassment? Costs come in lots of different currencies.

  And don’t forget the money that you spend on stuff you never really use. It could have been saved for something life-changing—a vacation, or a child’s college tuition. Is the stuff that costs money and fills up your house what makes you happiest, or would you be happier with less stuff and access to that long-gone money?

  Excuse #4: “My House is Too Small.”

  There’s nothing wrong with hoping to better your circumstances. If all goes well, we do that throughout our lives—get better cars, eat at fancier restaurants, take more exotic vacations, move to better houses in nicer neighborhoods. It’s part of the American dream—always planning to upgrade our standard of living.

  Clutter steals our space. While you wait to achieve that dream, are you barely able to move about in your home? It’s simple math. You can’t fit stuff into space that doesn’t exist. Yet time and again, I see people trying to achieve this impossibility. Repeat after me: I only have the space I have. It comes back to living in the present. You need space to live a happy, fruitful life. If you fill up that space with stuff for “the next house,” your present life suffers. Stop claiming your house is too small. The amount of space you have cannot be changed—the amount of stuff you have can. Here’s your choice: You should either move to a larger place now (and I mean now), or get rid of some of your stuff. Hoarding for “someday” is never worth it. If you’re really going to be that much richer, you’ll be able to afford the stuff you need when you need it.

  And one other thought: Just because you have the space doesn’t mean you have to fill it with stuff. When I say that you need space to breathe, I want you to clearly understand what I mean. Commit to having open, clutter-free space in your home and you soon discover that the mood you create externally in your home begins to fill you internally. Clarity, perspective, focus, and a sense of openness all come with a clutter-free space.

  Excuse #5: “i Don’t Have the Time.”

  I wish I had ten dollars for every time I’ve heard this excuse! Life is short—definitely. You lead a busy life—for sure. Long hours at work—and getting longer. Kids to entertain or chauffeur from one activity to the next—it never ends. Weekends are precious—without doubt. The last thing you want to do is spend your limited free time getting rid of clutter. Come to think of it, you don’t have any free time to speak of. You’d love to clean up if you just had a day off.

  Clutter monopolizes our time. How much time do you spend looking for your keys, or an unpaid bill, or the permission slip for your kid’s field trip? Does listening to a favorite CD involve sorting through your disorganized music collection? Does setting up a place for your kids to make Halloween decorations require moving piles and hunting fruitlessly for last year’s long-lost supplies? The time you lose because of the clutter is doubled when you consider the time, energy, and effort that are sapped from you mentally and psychologically. One effect of clutter is that you shut down—you have to spend all your energy just coping with the mess, rather than tending to the things that really matter to you. No matter how far behind you are, you can make the time to free yourself from clutter. It’s an investment in yourself that will turn things around. And after you’ve made that investment and changed the order of your home, the time spent will come back to you, with interest.

  Excuse #6: “I Don’t Know How it Got Like This.”

  You’re not a big spender. You don’t shop a lot. You may not collect anything. You just innocently go about your life, working, eating, sleeping, and socializing. Even so, your home just seems to get more and more cluttered as the years go by. Magazines, books, videos, clothes, gifts—the inflow of daily life. On top of that, maybe you inherited stuff from your parents or your kids went off to college and left the remnants of their youth. It’s easy to accumulate things, but hard to let go. Trust me—if you always add and never subtract, you will eventually bury yourself. You need to set limits, and the limits are easy to create. They are determined by the amount of space you have, your priorities and interests, and the agreements you make with other members of your household.

  Clutter takes over. One thing that constantly surprises me is that regardless of the amount of clutter in a home, the homeowners often express some surprise at it being there—almost as though someone filled their home with stuff while they were away on vacation! People freely admit that it is their stuff, but in the next breath they tell me they are confounded by how it got that way.

  You own your possessions. What you have is yours, or is in your care. It’s your responsibility. It’s your doing. When clutter becomes overwhelming, something shifts in our relationship to our stuff. For whatever reason, we hand control over to the things we own. Because of the clutter we cannot have people into our homes; we cannot find things; we cannot move freely in our own space and have to compromise because of the constraints the disorganization places on us. Don’t throw up your hands and act like this is beyond your control. It won’t fix itself. Step up!

  Excuse #7: “It’s Not a Problem—

  My Husband/Wife/Partner/Child Just Thinks it is.”

  If this is your excuse, you’re probably reading this book (or just this section) because someone’s making you do it—maybe even watching over your shoulder while you do so! You’re fine with the clutter. It doesn’t bother you. Your home is “lived in,” and that’s how you like it. You’d rather live your life than become a maid. Your collection may take up a lot of space, but it’s worth it.

  At a recent event a couple approached me. The wife complained bitterly that the husband kept the original packaging material and boxes for every single piece of electronic equipment item they had ever purchased. She thought it was ridiculous. He thought it was necessary in case they moved or needed to return an item. I asked how many boxes he had in their basement. He said it was about sixty. She claimed it was even more. Then I asked her how many boxes she thought he should have. She said zero. When I asked him how many he thought was reasonable, he said, “Ten?” The wife resisted at first, but eventually agreed that this was a reasonable compromise. Here’s the kicker: I asked them how long they had been fighting about this. The answer? Five years!

  Clutter jeopardizes our relationships. People fight about clutter. Frequently when I’m working with couples, one of them will announce vehemently: “You need to tell him/her to get rid of———.” This immediately sparks a harsh response from the other person. As the years pass, these fights escalate and people become inflexible. The argument for who gets to keep what becomes a battlefield, a struggle to get one’s way. Once sides are taken, both become entrenched. If one wins, one has to lose. If one is happy, one will be sad. None of this is necessary or healthy. What’s more important to you—the stuff you’re holding on to or the quality of your relationship with your partner? How do you want to spend your time—arguing about empty boxes or working out a reasonable compromise? With couples, communication is key to solving the clutter problem.

  DEAR PETER:

  I can’t take it anymore. My husband of twenty-three years has buried our house in twenty-three years of crap. I swear, he’s never thrown anything away. Ever. If I try to throw anything away I find him outside picking through the trash at 2:00 A.M.! I live in a fire trap and can barely get from room to room. My husband’s little “habit” is destroying our marriage.

  Excuse #8: “It isn’t Mine.”

  How is it that our homes are filled with others’ possessions? We borrow garden tools and cribs. We store things for our friends or other family members. Our kids move out but leave everything they don’t want or don’t have room for in their rooms or in the garage. In more
than one case, I’ve seen someone storing rooms of items that belong to their ex-partner—and in one case the divorce had been more than eight years earlier! You’re a very nice person. You would never take the liberty of throwing away someone else’s valued possession. But maybe you should.

  Other people’s clutter robs us of opportunities that should be ours. Think about this distinction. There is a huge difference between the knowledge that you own something and the sense that someone has entrusted something to you. Being prepared to look after things for someone else is a great and generous gesture, but, once again, it’s a question of balance. If your home is bursting at the seams with things that belong to others, there are two obvious questions that you need to ask: If this thing is so important to someone else, why is it sitting in my basement? Whose life am I living here—my own, surrounded with the things I love and cherish, or someone else’s, cluttered with the things they cannot or will not remove from my space? This can be a tough call, but your home is just that—your home. Don’t operate your home as a storage facility for someone else’s clutter. Don’t let their possessions control you.

  Excuse #9: “It’s Too Overwhelming.”

  I have infinite sympathy for this excuse. You’re not arguing that the clutter has a purpose. You’re not attached to the past or to a fantasy of the future. You look at the amount of stuff in your life and feel sickened by it. You wish you could change the way things are, but it’s too hard. It’s completely overwhelming. You’re just being honest about your emotional response. I can’t sit here and say, “No, you’re wrong. It’s not overwhelming.” All I can do is talk to you about the emotional toll of clutter and hope that you’ll see how freeing yourself of it will free you of those anxious, stressed-out feelings. Oh yeah, and then—in the rest of the book—I’m going to help you do it by breaking it down into simple, manageable steps.