Downsizing and Moving On

To your tiny house?

My sister’s problem is on another level. She inherited valuable Asian artifacts and a library of rare first editions from her husband’s family and she has no children to leave them to. It turns out to be quite hard to sell a Ming vase for anything like its value. Apparently museums have enough of them already. She can’t wait to downsize to a small maintenance-free apartment so she is working on donating everything to a university.

Meanwhile I have been grappling with piles of papers left by my parents. As I sort through them I find poignant stories from our family history that I knew nothing about. I am organizing them all into archival boxes so the next generations can easily access them. One box is labeled World War II and contains my father’s British army records and my mother’s memoir of growing up in Belgium during the German occupation. I imagine some future descendant using the contents as primary sources for a school paper.

Getting rid of stuff, organizing what really matters, and moving into smaller spaces seems to be on everyone’s mind in our generation. One book kept coming up in our conversations. Everyone seems to have heard of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The book is not for everyone. My informal focus group thought that folding socks like a sushi roll bordered on the compulsive, but that evaluating objects for whether they give you “joy” was good advice for those inclined to hang on to too much stuff.

Does this give you joy?