Identifying What Isn't Working

Excerpted from
The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters
By Sarah Susanka

The first step in implementing the blueprint for a Not So Big Life is to take a look at our lives to identify what stands in the way of living the way we'd like to be living. This isn't easy because it requires that we look objectively at many aspects of our daily life that we take entirely for granted.

But this is the same process you would undertake if you were considering remodeling a house. There are walls that you assume are structural and can't be moved, but a visit from an architect opens up all sorts of options you'd never considered before, and those walls may turn out to be expendable. Maybe they're not serving the purpose you thought they were, and by removing them, you'll be able to have an entirely new experience of your house. Without your having to add on or build a totally new house, it will feel a lot more spacious and give you more of the warm, homey feeling you've always longed for.

This is how we'll find some breathing room in our lives-by identifying the things we assume are very important but in fact are simply obscuring our view of what lies beyond them.

There are two major culprits responsible for our feeling overwhelmed. One is the accumulation of things we think we need; the other is the speed at which we race through our days. We barely recognize these agents of dissatisfaction because they are so much a part of the fabric of our existence, yet both factors significantly influence the way we live. In order to do something about them and to determine whether they are structural, we need to look at them more closely.

It's almost impossible for us to imagine a time when clocks didn't exist and the day unfolded on the basis of the sun's rising and setting. Before Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, Americans averaged around ten hours of sleep a night. Today that number is closer to seven, though any parent or busy professional will tell you that seven is a lot! In the past, people's lives were filled with hard work, but the work ensured survival: keeping food on the table, a roof overhead, and clothing on one's back. It wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century that luxury and leisure became part of the working-class lifestyle. Remember Henry Ford's visionary notion of turning his Model T factory workers into his own customers? Even he would find unthinkable the kind of accumulation of wealth that's possible today.

One of my favorite books beautifully illustrates the limitations of our consumer approach to successful living. For Material World: A Global Family Portrait, the photographer Peter Menzel invited sixteen other photographers to travel to thirty countries, spend time with a statistically average family in each country, and photograph the family members in front of their homes, together with all their material possessions. Looking at the book's images, readers instantly understand that the Mali family, with only a few items for cooking and cleaning, has imbued those objects with deep meaning. On the other hand, the Kuwaiti family, with four cars and a forty-five-foot sofa, or the American family, with the contents of their home filling the better part of the cul-de-sac they live on, seem almost lost in all their stuff.

Although it's difficult to see our own lives so clearly, when we look, we can begin to make out the impact of material possessions and time on our lives and the ways they work together to sponge up most of our waking moments. Imagine a documentary film that recorded every moment of a day in your life. How much rushing around fills the day? Is that what best describes who you are and who you aspire to be? If not, what does it signify? And why is it that when we're not working our tails off, we're shopping till we drop?

There are thousands of reasons for wanting to own something, and some of them are eminently practical. But for most of us today the wanting is only that; it's not a need. We believe subliminally that the object of our heart's desire will somehow fill the sense of emptiness inside and make us feel more substantial, more significant both to ourselves and to others.

The sad reality is that no amount of stuff can fill the void created by our own absence. Stuff is no substitute for experiencing who and what we really are. If you stop now and recall one or two of the significant moments in your life that you recorded in the last chapter, would you trade any of them for the current desired object? No, of course not. Not even close. That's why so much spiritual literature points to the poverty of the wealthy and heralds the wealth of the poor. It's not that you have to be poor to live richly in your inner world, but the ability to purchase whatever you want-or the desire to-often becomes a huge obstacle to understanding what matters.

When we own stuff, we have to maintain it. We also have to earn enough money to procure it, house it, protect it, keep it clean, and insure it against theft or loss. So every purchase has strings attached. It will require a long-term commitment from you if you become its owner, and that in turn will keep you a little busier than you would otherwise have been. That extra busyness also makes it a little more challenging to show up in the rest of your life, to be truly present in whatever it is you are doing. Although when considered individually, each purchase seems fairly innocuous in its time requirements, taken collectively, the impact of all that stuff can be enormous. One new suit or sweater takes up minimal closet space, for example, but thirty new items of clothing may force a closet remodeling. That remodeling takes time, energy, and money, all of which can, if you are not paying attention, keep you from doing the things that have real meaning for you.

When I bought my first house after having lived in a small studio apartment, I was struck by how empty it felt when I first moved in. I had the same amount of stuff, but now it was spread over twelve hundred square feet instead of four hundred. It felt barren, to be honest. So I decided to go out and purchase some things to make it feel homier. I went through a period of acquisition, and when I could afford it, I'd buy the object that was currently on the top of my desired-stuff list. First it was a set of shelves for my stereo system. Then it was a couch and a love seat. Next, a coffee table. All of these things were useful, of course, but I started to become aware that I wasn't any happier than I had been when I lived in my apartment and had less stuff. I simply owned more things. My purchasing gave me the impression of getting somewhere, but I remember wondering, as I brought each new object into the house, what it was I was really creating. Was an improved nest truly giving me a greater quality of life, or was it more like an albatross? I didn't dwell on the question long enough to listen for the answer. At the time I was having way too much fun believing I was making it as a successful human.

There was a kind of longing that I often felt when I designed a new house or remodeled an existing one for clients. I saw what a beautiful setting I could create for their lives, and I wanted the ability to do the same for my own. It's clear to me now that I was trying to live up to the expectations of my clients. There seemed to be an almost universal expectation among them that I should be making enough money to afford to surround myself with a beautiful structure of my own creation. So pretty much on automatic, I went about trying to make this happen.

That's how most of our purchasing happens. There's a subtle pressure, one we are typically unaware of, to meet the expectations of our peers and colleagues and families by keeping up with, or exceeding, their purchasing. We have unconsciously created a huge game in present-day consensus reality that entails accumulating sufficient wealth to purchase our way into perceived respectability and so, we assume, into significance. But it's a hollow dream. There's no meaning in all those acquisitions and no meaning in keeping up with the Joneses, other than sharing with them the frustration of feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task of keeping up.