Hi there
How are you all? Me, I’m in a state of humungous upheaval.
We’ve finally got a moving date, so I am in the midst of the painful process of sifting through 23 years of accumulated belongings before we leave our house in 3 weeks’ time. I should admit at this point that my hero husband is doing most of the heavy lifting (literally): This morning he was heaving 2 old rockers to the Recycling Centre.
He’s been squirrelling through cupboards sorting everything from sheets to the kids’ old socks. We have literally thousands of books (the thing I really care about) and I have cupboards bursting with clothes, which I am currently tackling.
I am not exactly a hoarder but because I am fertile when it comes to telling stories and emotional about the history of objects, I am too prone to fishing something out of a box Derek has packed and thinking that I have to have it – NOT helpful.
What to keep, what to throw away?
I keep thinking about what wonderful NOON Queenager Julie said at our last Welsh retreat when she downsized from a mighty home in the countryside to a townhouse. She said it was a major effort and a huge emotional task to sort through everything but when it was done she felt so much better and lighter. I’m trying to hold the hope!
It’s also made me think about the whole process of what we throw away and what we keep. We did a little ceremony to say goodbye to our house before my daughters went back to University. They have lived here all their lives, so I thought it was important that we have some kind of a ritual.
A Buddhist friend suggested lighting some candles, putting honey in the corners of the house (to unstick ourselves) and a short ceremony. I decided to have a go. My kids were a little sceptical but they endured it womanfully…. So for any of you doing something similar, this was the ritual….
My unsticking ritual
I lit candles, filled a bowl with rice, another with water with lavender oil. We gathered in front of the sitting room fireplace, with a meaningful object. Mine was the ball of rose quartz crystal I’d held through both the girls’ births. One daughter chose a book (we – particularly their dad – read to them every night of their childhood). The other brought down a beloved fluffy bear, and my husband, Shaggy, from Scooby Doo, a figure we all used to play with when they were small.
We thanked the house for looking after us and keeping us safe, talked about all the happy times we’ve had here and did a little meditation where we imagined filling the place with pink, purple and silver light to bless it for the next family. It was a poignant marker of a big moment. A nice way to say thank you and goodbye.
‘Learn to live well with little’
It’s also made me realise that when weeding through our lives, there are some objects which are surprisingly precious. For me, as I said, it’s the books – when we had to move out about 10 years ago while the house was fixed up, my books were the only things I missed. But for all of us, it’s different. My younger daughter brilliantly cleared out her room, but she just couldn’t bear to get rid of her beloved soft toys. So we decided she didn’t have to.
Ditto my husband and his CDs and vinyl. He has an incredible music collection: We’ve decided to build special shelves for it in the new house and make it a feature. In a way the sorting is a process of working out what we care about and want to take on with us, and what we don’t – and as ever it isn’t what we initially think!
What selling the family home means
This whole downsizing process has made me think about what houses hold for us. It’s certainly been emotional. First the decision to do it.
“You can only sell the family home once,” warned Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. She’s right: It’s hard to part with the walls which have witnessed so many happy memories. But I also think it is crazy to stay in a house for the sake of Christmas dinner. So many families keep a huge barn of a place that they no longer need just to be able to muster the clan at key moments. I mean, isn’t that what an AirBNB is for?
The reason we decided to downsize is to free up some cash. Like many midlifers in the UK, our family house is currently the custodian of all our financial Lego pieces. We’ve almost paid off the mortgage, but we realised that even if we do, all our money will still be in the house (and with the prospect of Rachel Reeves imposing capital gains tax on primary residences, it felt like a good time to sell).
It’s the right time
It’s also the right time for us. We have one kid about to finish university and the other out in the world: Do we really need a 4-bedroom family house? When the kids aren’t there, we fairly rattle around. It costs a fortune to heat the big empty rooms, particularly as energy prices have soared. We’re in the catchment area for several excellent state schools … none of which we need anymore. It’s a brilliant house for raising a family – but that isn’t us anymore. Our kids are raised. It’s time to move on, to clear out so someone else can benefit from the house and its position. The place needs the patter of tiny feet, the rhythm of kids going to school and coming home. We bought it when I was 4 months’ pregnant with our first child. Now she’s about to turn 23 and we are starting a new chapter as well.
The trouble is, that while it makes sense to sell up, and reorganise our Lego into different more accessible piles, it is also hard to do. Downsizing means moving somewhere cheaper. That can feel depressing. We’ve spent months on a RightMove binge – usually in bed, both of us clicking and swiping and comparing. We looked round nearly 40 flats, eventually deciding we needed 3 bedrooms, in case the kids boomerang home. But in their absence, the rooms can be an office and a snug. We couldn’t afford 3 bedrooms and a garden. So that’s a compromise.
After looking at London flats and finding the exercise depressing, we considered moving out. You can buy a palace in the country for the price of a two bed in the capital. So we started playing Escape to the Country for real – the space, the garden – until the reality of being hours from home, family, friends, community, work and culture brought us back to our senses.
We’re staying in inner London for now; it’s my happy place. But the countryside fantasy made me realise that much of my reluctance to downsize was wrapped up with status. By moving out we could have a bigger, cheaper, house… while the reality of downsizing is exactly that: Living somewhere smaller and less swanky.
Looking round all those flats, I realised that there is a lot of ego and status involved in where we decide to live. If we’re going to effectively right-size (downsize feels depressing and regressive), we need to get over ourselves and our status anxiety and look to the bigger picture.
The truth is we don’t need all our current space. And before we lived in this big house, we were totally happy in smaller flats. This move is about our lives now that we’re in our mid 50s. That involves swapping real-estate square-footage and our glorious floor-to-ceiling windows for a home which has enough space for us all but also leaves us mortgage free with a bit left over.
And that means freedom. If it all goes through (fingers crossed) my husband can retire and I’ll only have to do the work that excites me. I am aware that is a hugely privileged position to be in.
What does success look like for downsizing?
Taking the ego hit on the house means less stress, more pleasure and leisure and the opportunity to help our fledgling adult kids by paying for Masters degrees (increasingly necessary to get them on the jobs ladder) or to act as the bank of mum and dad if they want to get on the housing market themselves in due course. In the meantime, there is still space for all of us in the new pad.
The last year has been a lesson not just in real estate (the market has plunged 10% since January) but in working out what success looks like to us now, it’s been a big shift. I’ve moved from feeling that my nice house, which I’ve worked hard to pay for for 25 years, defines me to realising that success for me now isn’t a status abode but the freedom to live the life I want.
I’ve learnt that getting over my real-estate ego equals freedom. That the smaller flat – yes, we finally found something that fit our criteria of having something nice about it and 3 bedrooms, just around the corner from where we live now but for half the money – means liberation from monthly payments and having to work to meet them.
This is my new uncertainty
As the poet Paul Muldoon said to me when we spent time together during a literary festival in Ireland: “Learn to live well with little”. It made me realise that often we already have everything we need but sometimes it needs to be redeployed!
Yes, there’s a compromise; our new flat definitely does not have the Wow factor of our old house. It’s on a busier road, it’s not as pretty; Hampstead Heath will have to be our garden. But the advantages of having freed up the family Lego for other schemes makes it all worthwhile.
I am writing this because, as a property columnist for many years, I saw so many people who were trapped Miss Haversham-like in houses which no longer fitted them; clinging to the past. In the 100-year life – which many of us are going to lucky enough to live – we are all going to have to get better at change: at rightsizing, at pivoting into new phases.
We are all going to have to get better at riding the uncertainty about doing something new, leaning into the fear and anxiety until we start feeling excited about the possibility of a new way of living. Yes, change is difficult, and scary. But taking the plunge, selling up, deciding to define success differently and live in a new way is exciting and rejuvenating.
Change after all is evidence of life. Nothing stays the same. Maybe now is a good time to get over your own property ego and right-size your life. Rightsizing is an emotional process – as I described at the beginning of this newsletter, but we are getting there. And success for me now is about freedom – not a status house.
Love
Eleanor
P.S. Many of you know how much I love the pond, how the nature there has soothed and instructed me during this big change in my life. So I want to share this little vignette that happened when I came back from our Guildford Divorce Focus Group (thanks to Sue Durrans, our fabulous NOON Surrey Circle leader, for hosting and for all of you incredible Queenagers who came and shared). Sitting on my dining room table was a big box full of the paperbacks of Much More to Come. It was thrilling to see the kingfisher on the cover again and the bright blue.
The sun was shining so I headed up to the pond to swim. What a glorious day. Warm sun, the water at 14 degrees which is my favourite temperature – a frisson of cold but still swimmable for 15 or 20 minutes. I wallowed in the green water, ecstatically happy in the sunlight, luxuriating in the light and the blue sky, diving down doing my best coromorant impression and following the sun on the pond. And then, to crown the day: Whizzzzzz – a flash of turquoise and a Kingfisher! A true blessing – I haven’t seen one for ages. But it is always a special day when it appears and particularly appropriate given the arrival of the book and the current upheaval. It felt like a sign saying we are on the right path.
And THANKS so much to all of you who have booked on our Rebrand Yourself™ Course.
Remember: Enrolment ends at midnight tonight and we have a live kick-off session this Tuesday at 12.30pm, so if you want to do it today is your last chance.
xxx
