In my twenties, I found myself in a scary place. I was buried beneath something very heavy. I was just heavy all over. Weighed down completely.

Suddenly, one day, it simply made sense to me that this was a cause and effect situation. I was literally buried beneath things. And if this was true, then there had to be a way to wiggle out and get free.

We all have a tendency to hoard, somewhere, to some degree. Something physical, emotional, or spiritual that is dragging us down in some way, a little or a lot.

It is arguable that only Americans believe they cannot live with any fewer than 3,000 square feet and fourteen closets in their homes. All I need to do is watch a few episodes of House Hunters and I find myself temped to lunge for the screen to choke the person that won’t stop saying, “it’s too small… there isn’t enough storage space… I can’t share a bathroom sink with my husband…”

It all seems to revolve around stuff.

How much stuff we have.

What kind of stuff we have.

What kind of stuff we need.

What kind of stuff we want.

How we will get stuff.

How we will get rid of stuff.

How we can afford stuff.

Where we should put our stuff.

Where we can fit our stuff.

Finding lost stuff.

It seems to me that if I have certain stuff, I will believe certain things about my life. For instance:

I must have a ________ square foot house.

I must work _______ hours a week.

I do not have enough _______.

Being _________ in debt is necessary… normal… unavoidable… unchangeable.

I have no time for __________.

I can’t afford ________.

What if, by stripping away the excess we really would change everything about our lives? What if much of what we believe we can, cannot, should, and should not do would change? And in that, entirely different perspectives, goals, desires, and beliefs would emerge? A whole new identity?

There’s clutter and unnecessary excess everywhere I look in my life. Clutter that makes my life less enjoyable, less efficient, less clear, less focused, less orderly, less peaceful.

Clutter in what I own.

What I say.

What I think.

What I believe.

What I eat.

What I watch and listen to.

In my time schedule.

In my emotions.

If you’ve ever seen the sitcom Friends, you know that Monica is a compulsive neat freak. In one episode there is this locked mystery door in the back of her apartment that everyone is suddenly questioning what is behind. She won’t talk about it and claims there is no key. Finally, at the end, her friends break in and expose her dirty secret: everything she has no place or category for has been tossed in willy nilly. It is a complete hoarded disaster.

I have found that this is exactly how I tend to be. I may keep my house minimally furnished, uncluttered, neat and tidy and yet there are always areas (closets, drawers, or even entire rooms at times) where I toss anything that does not fit into this image until I can deal with it. And there it stays until I figure out how and if I want to rid myself of it. Since I do this in my house, I know that I also do it in other parts of my life. Bad habits are scarcely ever contained in just one area. They seep out and leak from hearts and minds and beliefs and then touch us in many places.

What it comes down to is that certain stuff distracts us from other stuff. Some stuff less important takes our time away from some stuff more important. Some stuff literally makes us feel less energetic, less motivated, less driven to succeed at certain tasks and achievements. Some stuff causes us depression, fatigue, and body pain. Some stuff makes us believe negative things about our value and abilities. Some stuff makes us crazy.

It was this very frustration, the feeling I was suffocating, that led me to begin stripping things away. I decided I wanted to be an essentialist, but not just physically, with what I owned. I didn’t want extra weight anywhere in my life. I wanted to move about as light and unburdened as possible. I wanted to only be tied to truly valuable and important things, not just things.

If we knew exactly what kinds of stuff, tangible and intangible, that dragged us down in some way, and exactly what kinds of stuff that propelled us to succeed, would we not have the precise formula we need to prosper everywhere?

I asked myself this: if I shed just one thing every day, from some category, somewhere in my heavy stash, how much lighter would I be in one week, year, decade? What would be the long-term effect on my life? What would I accomplish? Who would I become? What mysteries of the universe would I discover? What buried secrets would I uncover? How would my beliefs change? How would my identity change?

I knew, innately, that my desire to be good and free and pure relied solely on getting this mastered. I was going to find out exactly what was good and essential in my life, and get rid of all the rest.

So I started experimenting by stripping things away from all sorts of different places, finding all sorts of different methods to do this when the things were intangible, somewhere in my heart and mind and spirit.

When I started stripping away the excess, I was stunned at the surprises that lay beneath it all.

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