What Is Rightsizing?

Rightsizing Your Life: Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most
by Ciji Ware

Whether it's going from the multi-bedroom suburban house to the city condo, or from a country and city house to one cozy cottage, millions of Americans in the coming years will face the task of planning a shift to smaller or more practical quarters, paring down a lifetime of possessions and furnishing their new lives with things that have meaning. This simplification of surroundings and "stuff" will liberate people in mid-life to pursue their passions such as travel or hobbies without the responsibilities of a big house weighing them down.

Rightsizing will be more than a handbook about the process of planning a new environment, jettisoning a lifetime's worth fo surplus household items, and moving painlessly into a more suitable space. It will also be the first comprehensive guide to the emotional passage that this winnowing process entails, providing a prescription for the internal hurdles that can easily sabotage sensible decision making.

Chapter 1

Why rightsizing is becoming our new way of life

Time for a Change

There comes a moment when you pass the half-century mark that is hard to pinpoint or even predict, but you know intuitively when it has occurred. It's a flash of recognition, an instant when you realize something important has changed and that it is time for a change. Your old life just doesn't fit anymore.

Maybe it's the day you put your youngest child on the plane for college. The day you sign a divorce decree or your beloved family dog dies. It could be the week you witness a parent pass away, your spouse is scheduled for open-heart surgery, or the company that's employed you for decades is sold to a competitor and your job is handed to a twenty-five-year-old.

It's that first Thanksgiving you don't cook the turkey, but your daughter-in-law does. It's the winter you swear off downhill skiing and decide cross-country might make more sense. And when that feels like too much work, you opt for a cup of hot chocolate and a good book in front of the fire.

The signal that change is in the wind might even be made of lighter stuff: a nanosecond of exasperation when you haul a pile of folded laundry up two flights of stairs. A moment when you realize you're not much interested in working in your wood shop anymore, or the bridge club is starting to be a bore, or you'd rather take a class in memoir writing than teach another year of third grade or continue as CEO of your company.

Such a day is usually bittersweet, and yet strangely full of promise. It's almost as if a generation that is forecast to live longer, in better health than anyone in the history of our planet is about to walk down a totally new path no one has ever trod before.

The road that presently stretches in front of our "baby boomer" generation - the estimated seventy-seven million Americans born between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Vietnam War - is uncharted territory. Indeed it's fraught with uncertainty and, for some, no small amount of anxiety about what this "third act" will bring to a generation expected to live a very long time.

Some of the questions prompted by the coming new phase are seriously unsettling. Where will I live? What will my environment look like? What will it be like? Who will I be living with, spending time with, and ultimately depending upon?

Rightsizing Defined

I've come to think of this transition for baby boomers and the generations that bookend them as "rightsizing your life." In contrast to downsizing it is a process, not an event, and its outcome has more to do with the "right" of the equation than "size." It involves not just the square footage of a person's living quarters but an approach to all aspects of living, holding out the opportunity "to get it right, once and for all."

Rightsizing in this context is a conscious, practical, and psychological evolution in the way one lives one's life, a process that enables people to create new surroundings that will profoundly impact the way they feel and behave. It leads to simplifying, decluttering, perhaps even redesigning one's environment. It may even prompt a move - either to smaller, more practical quarters or to a home (or homes) that could be larger, but more suited to your needs. The transition will, if executed properly, liberate you from many real-life burdens and free you in ways you cannot now imagine.

For many, the rightsizing process will certainly involve physical and emotional upheaval and could even result in a total reinvention of your personal ecosystem. For the resilient, however, these major life changes provide an opportunity for discovering the truest sense of home you may ever have known.

That being said, I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you my story.

A Rightsizing Tale

For me the moment it became clear that a major change in my life was under way was quite vivid. On an early Saturday morning one raw March day, my husband and I stood shivering on the loading dock at Nor-Cal Moving and Storage Company in San Jose, California. We watched as a forklift operator lined up five ten-foot-square wooden containers, all overflowing with the accumulated possessions of twenty-five years of marriage.

We were sorting through our possessions after a move from a large and reasonably luxurious family home in Los Angeles, where my family had lived for twenty-two years. My husband had been recruited to join a Silicon Valley company - a great professional move for him. But what in God's name had made us think it was a good idea to decamp to a smaller home (a mere 1,200 square feet, as compared to our roomy 4,000 square feet of living space in southern California)? Somehow we needed to make our life fit into a much smaller San Francisco apartment ... and I was just starting to realize what a challenge this was going to be.

The first object to emerge from the packing crates was a child-size rocking chair with a petit point seat cover that I had crafted during my first and only pregnancy, decades earlier. My husband picked up the little chair and swiftly consigned it to a pile next to a sign we'd scrawled that read: "Throw Away."

Copyright © 2007 by Ciji Ware

About the Author

Ciji Ware has been a print and broadcast journalist for twenty-five years, best known as a health and lifestyle commentator for ABC in Los Angeles. She is the author of Sharing Parenthood After Divorce and more recently, five historical novels.