Balancing Act: What I Learned from Letting Go of a Lifetime of Accumulated Possessions

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

A purge of the possessions held onto for decades clears more than storage units; it frees the mind and heart as well

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When my wife passed away in 2017, I needed to downsize from a house to an apartment. I was too overwhelmed by grief and the complications of life to think clearly about much of anything. So I filled three storage units with everything from furniture to books and clothing. Many memories were locked away when I did this. And I went on with my life.

I knew that there were precious things locked away, but I also knew that much of what I had put in storage was not precious. It had been easier for me at that point in my life to not make tough