Estate Living Magazine Retirement Living - Issue 40 April 2019 | Page 28

P R O P E R T Y
&
I N V E S T M E N T
SCALING
DOWN
As retirement looms, it’s natural to begin
reflecting on the past, but it’s not a time for
doom and gloom. It’s the time to put the past
behind you, and look at the new opportunities
these changes bring. It’s also quite often a
time of downsizing – and with that comes the
need to declutter. While it may be scary, it’s
also surprisingly liberating.
When the house we bought became a home, each room played
witness to our lives: the love, the laughter and the tears. It’s where the
kids were born, nurtured, schooled and fledged; where memories
were made and photographs hung; where treasured books line
shelves and where our belongings live. For many, our homes reflect
the places we’ve been and the friends we’ve made along the way. fresh food. Our minds and emotions are a little more complex. Here
we need to address the stuff that steals our power and our joy. This
entails some tough ‘heart’ stuff – getting rid of negative emotions,
like unforgivingness, resentment, guilt, anger and the like.
‘And you’re asking me to give this all up?’ I hear you say … Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University
in Chicago who studies the causes of clutter and its impact on
emotional wellbeing, says that ‘clutter is an overabundance of
possessions (read “stuff”) that collectively creates chaotic and
disorderly living spaces.’ A cluttered space is bad enough, but a
cluttered mind, body and soul are detrimental to our health and
longevity – which, clearly, we want loads of for all those exciting
post-retirement opportunities.
As overwhelming as this thought might be, with the right mind-set
and appropriate ‘tools’ at our disposal it may be easier than we think.
And it may lead to the best years of our lives.
‘We all have two lives. The second one starts
when we realise that we have only one.’
Sound a bit airy-fairy for you?
– Tom Hiddleston, aka ‘Loki’ from Marvel Movies.
‘Okay, I’m convinced’, you say … so how do we achieve this?
Cluttered spaces lead to cluttered minds and
cluttered lives Make it happen
South African speaker and coach, Kate Emmerson, author of the
book Clear your Clutter, defines clutter as ‘anything that no longer
empowers you’. She suggests we look at not just our physical stuff,
but at ourselves holistically – our minds and emotions as well as our
bodies. Our bodies are perhaps the easiest to deal with – ‘just’ get
rid of the ‘bad’ stuff we put into them, the stuff that saps our energy,
steals our health and depletes our ‘va-va-voom’, as she likes to call
it, and drink more water, get more sleep, more exercise and more We can go hard-core, and follow the advice of Japanese minimalist
Marie Kondo, whose book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up
has taught millions of people all over the world how to declutter
their homes. She suggests that instead of tackling our homes room
by room, we should tackle them according to subject, starting with
what is easiest to part with – this way we don’t just relocate clutter
from one room to another. Start with all the clothes, then all the
books, then all the documents, other bits and bobs, and finally, the