James 2:8 “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
A moving van pulls away from the curb. 27 years of my neighbor’s lives are packed up in boxes and memories. Things touched, shared and loved are now in the hands of strangers transporting life to a new location. Moving stuff. Moving people.
Downsizing for older people is particularly hard as it feels like a final move. Especially toward the end of your life. Especially if it means a new location: Assisted Living, Independent Living, another state with family or a Skilled Nursing Center. They cannot keep all the things that identified them. Grounded them. Their space is shrinking, just like their lives and their influences. It is like being on the down side of the slide. Very hard to do. Very hard to watch.
Downsizing from a divorce is challenging because you are splitting things, just like the relationship. One side table, one night stand, everything is split. Nothing ever matches anything again. One dog is split from the only other dog it has ever known. Smaller lodging is usually inevitable so you need less. But you feel the smaller amount of people in your orbit as well.
If it is so hard to part from houses, things, and people, why do we work so hard to accumulate and add them to our lives? Because we can. Because we need. Because we love. 