Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff

Auteur
Matt Paxton is one of the top cleaning, downsizing, decluttering, and hoarding experts in the country. He now hosts the Emmy-nominated PBS show Legacy List With Matt Paxton, after having been featured on A&E's Hoarders for 12 years. He appears regularly as a public speaker, television guest on shows and radio personality helping families find the upside of downsizing. He lives in Atlanta, GA with his family.

Texte du rabat

"America's top cleaning expert and star of the hit series Legacy List with Matt Paxton distills his fail-proof approach to decluttering and downsizing. Your boxes of photos, family's china, and even the kids' height charts aren't just stuff; they're attached to a lifetime of memories--and letting them go can be scary. With empathy, expertise, and humor, Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff helps you sift through years of clutter, let go of what no longer serves you, and identify the items worth keeping so that you can focus on living in the present. For over 20 years, Matt Paxton has helped people from all walks of life who want to live more simply declutter and downsize. As a featured cleaner on Hoarders and host of the Emmy-nominated Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS, he has identified the psychological roadblocks that most organizational experts routinely miss but that prevent so many of us from lightening our material load. Using poignant stories from the thousands of individuals and families he has worked with, Paxton brings his signature insight to a necessary task. Whether you're tired of living with clutter, making space for a loved one, or moving to a smaller home or retirement community, this book is for you. Paxton's unique, step-by-step process gives you the tools you need to get the job done"--

Résumé
America’s top cleaning expert and star of the hit series Legacy List with Matt Paxton distills his fail-proof approach to decluttering and downsizing.

Your boxes of photos, family’s china, and even the kids' height charts aren’t just stuff; they’re attached to a lifetime of memories--and letting them go can be scary. With empathy, expertise, and humor, Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff, written in collaboration with AARP, helps you sift through years of clutter, let go of what no longer serves you, and identify the items worth keeping so that you can focus on living in the present.
 
For over 20 years, Matt Paxton has helped people from all walks of life who want to live more simply declutter and downsize. As a featured cleaner on Hoarders and host of the Emmy-nominated Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS, he has identified the psychological roadblocks that most organizational experts routinely miss but that prevent so many of us from lightening our material load. Using poignant stories from the thousands of individuals and families he has worked with, Paxton brings his signature insight to a necessary task. 
 
Whether you’re tired of living with clutter, making space for a loved one, or moving to a smaller home or retirement community, this book is for you. Paxton’s unique, step-by-step process gives you the tools you need to get the job done.

Échantillon de lecture

Step One

 

Uncover the Stories Behind the Stuff

 

Did cleaning out Dad's space spark an epiphany that decluttering is my lifelong purpose? Not at all. I was just happy to put off my job search for a few months while I figured things out. I still had no idea how I was going to earn a living. My father, my hero, was gone, and I was lost and wandering-and the only thing worse than being lost in life is being lost in life and broke.

 

I had one thing going for me, though: a community. People knew my grandfather, they knew my father, and now they knew me. I had my people. The upside of a tightly knit community is that people look out for you when you're down on your luck. The downside is that everyone knows the details of your life. Both realities played into what happened next.

 

Word got around that I had cleared out my dad's house and that I was looking for work. At church one Sunday, a kindly eighty-year-old woman-we'll call her Etta-came over to me. I'd known her my entire life-she and her loving squad of bridge players, with their immaculate, blue-tinted white hair. No matter what was going on in their lives, these women got their hair done at the beauty parlor every other Thursday afternoon.

 

Etta told me she'd heard I was looking for some ways to make money and offered to help me out. She lived in an old colonial house like my father's, and her friends were encouraging her to downsize now that her beloved husband, Jim, had died. She was years away from going into senior living, she hastened to inform me. But she figured I could use some extra money. She asked if I could do some work for her.

 

I quickly agreed, happy to help her out and earn some cash. A few days later, I arrived at her home ready to clear out what I assumed were a few boxes.

 

Then I stepped inside. Etta's home was a sign of a well-lived life. Dishes and crystal of every type imaginable were stacked in her kitchen and dining room. Cases of wine and shelves of wineglasses. Linen tablecloths and napkins folded neatly. At least ten card tables and dozens of decks of cards. It looked to me like her home held enough to supply a banquet hall.

 

I had thought, going over to Etta's home, that helping her declutter would be depressing. Weren't we going to throw away a lifetime of stuff, after all? Wouldn't helping her clean out be like helping her write her own obituary?

 

That wasn't what happened at all. Over the next few weeks, Etta and I took pleasure in her favorite life stories. We didn't bury her best years; we celebrated them. She had an eager audience in me, and she was in control of how the organizational process worked. She took her time. Etta's memories were given another life when she recalled them to me-and in this chapter I'm giving them another life by recalling them to you. This is the most important part of the process-the part most experts miss entirely. If we don't know the stories behind the stuff, we will never be able to freely let go of it.

 

If you are in the process of decluttering, downsizing, or moving, telling your stories to an interested audience is the magic key. And if you're helping someone else, it's your responsibility to listen. In this chapter, I'm going to show you how to both tell and listen to the tales.

 

Why Different Generations Collect Different Stuff

 

If you're cleaning out the home of older generations, you'll likely notice how differently they consumed and collected stuff than we do in our current era. I hadn't realized this until cleaning Etta's home. Etta was an entirely different species from me or my dad. As we talked that day, I understood for the first time the significance of that generation gap.

 

Etta was a child of the Great Depression. Those of us who have grown up in more prosperous times might not understand what it was like to come of age when scarcity was the norm, not the exception. But those who lived through it never forget it. Soup kitchens and bread lines. Labor strikes and Dust Bowls. "One-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished," as President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1937. These traumatic memories become part of a generation's DNA. Starting with Etta and continuing for the last twenty-plus years, I have worked with that generation and witnessed the indelible imprint the Depression left upon millions of people. It's not always detectable in their words or actions out in public-but it's visible in their homes.

 

But I didn't know that yet. So at first, I wondered why Etta seemed to keep everything…