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Maybe you are at a stage where something in your life is too much…. If so, you are part of a harsh awakening…as we come to realize that happiness and success might not be measured by more material things. That having more possessions may be more suffocating than liberating. That a larger house, better car, and more “stuff” come with no guarantee of greater happiness. That for many of us, the stuff we own ends up owning us. Suddenly, you look around at the life you’ve built and all you’ve acquired and realize that it’s all too much!

From It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh.

If you’ve ever watched the TLC show Clean Sweep — come on, admit it, I know you have — then you know Peter Walsh. Walsh is the Dr. Phil of closet-organizing — except that he has a good head of hair and he actually makes sense. His book doesn’t need a plug by doodadblog. It’s already a New York Times bestseller. But assuming that the few of my readers may not be regular Oprah or TLC viewers, I thought I’d give it a quick review.

Recent events have caused me to examine my relationship with stuff. Becoming a stay-at-home dad has also made me more awere of our possessions. Clutter, for us, is not the big problem. It’s volume. We have more clothes than we can wear, more toys than we can play with, more dishes than we can eat from, more sheets than we can…well…soil, I guess.

And it’s a touchy subject, too. For instance, as soon as you point the finger at all your wife’s scrapbooking gear, there are three fingers pointing back at your now defunct (or is that de-funked?) CD collection, your university book collection and the old set of golf clubs that you hold onto in case a friend from out of town visits and doesn’t have any. As soon as you question why your kids each need five or six pairs of pyjamas when you were always okay with one, you’d better be ready to answer why you need 6 video games for your Nintendo DS when Pong was perfectly good when you were ten.

Of course, now that I’m home, I’m more accutely aware of our growing pile of things, mostly because I’m now the one who has to clean it up more often. And while all of the toys have a place of their own, when they’re all out of place it can take a very long time for them to find their way back.

And then there’s paperwork. Between bills that pile up, our kid’s artwork, and the hundreds of other pieces of paper that accumulate, it’s gotten harder and harder over the years to distinguish what we need to keep, what we want to keep, and what we should throw away. The two pounds of ads that come with our 2.1 pound local newspaper are immediately dumped in the recycling bin now. Once in a while I consider renting a self-storage space for a year and filling it with all of these ads. Then I’ll call a press conference to show them just how much junk they’re dropping at my door. But I digress.

Must…segue…back…

In his book, Walsh actually points to the growth of the self-storage industry as a symptom of North America’s epidemic of accumulation. We have larger houses, but we are putting increasingly more stuff in storage.

Walsh asserts that our homes and the things in them are a reflection of our values. More and more of us are becoming overwhelmed by consumption, accumulation and clutter. In order to fix the problem, we need to decide what’s really important to us. He recommends that we do this by imagining the life we want and comparing it to the life we’ve got. Then, we need to reorganize our homes to reflect the former. It’s not an easy task, especially because of our emotional attachment to things, and Walsh suggests that we have several key excuses to holding onto our stuff. Here are five of the biggies:

1. “I might need it one day.”
2. “It’s too important to let go.”
3. “My house is too small.”
4. “I don’t have the time.”
5. “It’s too overwhelming.”

Walsh then proceeds to slowly walk us through the steps we need to take to not just declutter and organize our homes, but to completely rethink, room by room, how we want to live in them. It’s hard work and for families it requires a team effort. I’m still stuck in the “I don’t have time” excuse, but I believe working through the book chapter by chapter will be worth the effort. If I can get buy-in from the missus (I’m gonna pay for that), I think we’ll use the book to guide us through this year’s spring clean.

P.S. A video version of the book is now available. If only I had room in my DVD collection…

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