26 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN | FROM THE NEST Ask the Expert grandchildren saying, I thought you might like to see how your mom looked when she was your age. It clears out her stacks of photo albums that she never really looks at anyway. It gives her one last chance to look at the pictures. And if the grandchildren toss them, well that's their choice, but at least she's sent them on to a future generation to enjoy and appreciate. I tell people, it’s like eating an elephant. You have to do it one bite at a time, because otherwise it's just too enormous a task to think about. Pick an area in your house that you don’t use very often because that's going to have the most things you don’t need. Set a timer for about an hour and a half. Once you walk into that room and start the timer, do not leave the room. ... No phone calls, no nothing. If you spend an hour and a half of focused time going through things, you’ll be surprised at how much you get done. After two to four hours, depending on your stamina and emotional ability, you get to the point where you’re unwilling to make any more decisions. You need to stop and give your emotions recovery time. I equate downsizing to going to the gym. You can’t do the same exercises every day. You just wear out emotionally. You need that recovery day. And so, with the process of downsizing, ideally plan a couple hours every other day.—Mary Ellen Alu If you’ve reached a point where the house is too big for you—you’re using five rooms and heating 17—or you've had a change in life situation or a change in your mobility situation, or you want to move to a different location … all those are reasons to downsize. Start early, end happy. What that means is, the more time you give yourself to make decisions, the less stressed and the less traumatic the change is going to be, because you can slowly ease emotionally into the fact that you’re saying goodbye to a lot of your possessions. Don’t be too proud or too embarrassed to ask for help, because when you’re trying to say goodbye to things, it’s hard. When you have someone to chat with or someone who keeps you company while you’re going through the process, you can get a whole lot more done in a fixed amount of time than if you try to do it all yourself. Get generous. Even if you’re not downsizing, now is just as good a time to give friends, family, children the things that you are interested in keeping. Give it to them now while you can enjoy hearing how they’re enjoying what it is you give them. … Something my mom is doing that I use as an example for my clients is she is deconstructing her photo albums. She’s taking the pictures out of the albums and sending them in stacks with a note attached to her “YOU HAVE TO DO IT ONE BITE AT A TIME, BECAUSE OTHERWISE IT'S JUST TOO ENORMOUS A TASK TO THINK ABOUT.” REAL ESTATE | ALUMNI ʼ79 The Art of Downsizing Ann Newberry ’79, owner of Smooth Transitions in Massachusetts, is an expert in problem-solving, logistics and project management. ILLUSTRATION BY KIM SALT
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==