Lighter.

We’re getting ready to move houses, and one of the things we always do when we move is get rid of a lot of stuff. I remember that when we moved from Greensboro to Boone seven years ago, we gave away 900 books… and a whole garage full of odds and ends. Now it’s time once again to lighten the load, and there’s something deeply freeing about this. It’s nice to live lighter, to have a smaller footprint in the world. As the old saying goes, the more stuff you own, the more it owns you.

Last October I wrote a series of posts on what Richard Rohr calls the “first half” and “second half” of life in terms of psychospiritual development, and I see that dynamic playing out in this sphere as well. The first half of life is a season of addition: We build a strong and necessary ego structure by identifying our tribe, our beliefs, and our loyalties—nationally, ethnically, and religiously. We add education, we add employment, we add a persona that seems to fit who we are or who we want to be. And of course we add stuff! Cars, houses, kids, and ever-increasing storage for our stuff. It multiplies like rabbits.

None of this is bad, but at some point, the tide begins to turn—or at least it’s supposed to. At some point there begins an inner shift that is meant to be echoed in an outer shift, and it’s a move toward deaccumulation. Deaccumulation psychically and materially.

It begins internally: Evolving souls need less tribal identifications and come to see the universality of the human condition and journey; we’re a lot more alike than we are different! When that happens (and it doesn’t always), we need fewer artificial reinforcements of identity from externals like clothes, credentials, and the many vestiges of achievement we pursue in the first half. In fact, life begins to invite us intuitively to sluff off unnecessary baggage and travel lighter, both figuratively and literally. My former spiritual director Lisa had a name and process for this called “shedding.” Have you ever heard of that?

My grandfather Hugh was a great practical example of this. He started with no financial resources, but he was an adventurous entrepreneur who tried his hand at a host of small businesses until he eventually became wealthy (at least in my view). So while his contemporaries were building ever-bigger houses for ever-smaller families, as he approached his later years he started giving all his money away! Really, I’ve never seen anything like it. He was a Christian but not what I would call a spiritual man; still, he sensed something innately spiritual: that as we approach the end of life, possessions eventually become toxic unless distributed.

It’s like the soul starts out small and grows in stature along with the body… just at a slower pace. Once the body stops growing at the end of the teen years, the soul is just beginning… so it’s like we unconsciously want to bolster these forming souls, these psychic identities, with lots of external props to appear more substantial than we are, than we can be at that early stage. But if the soul does its job, if it’s nurtured and cultivated over the years, it actually does become substantial in the second half of life, and it simply doesn’t need the props any more. In fact, the props become burdensome, cumbersome, inauthentic, and unnecessary.

We begin to simplify, pare down, and travel lighter. The soul shines with its own luminescence—and eventually it grows to where it can’t be contained by a physical container anymore. It yearns to be free… and then it becomes free. Of course, I haven’t made this transition yet personally, so this is just the way I imagine it. I find myself keenly observing people who are approaching that transition: What’s happening inside? Are they tightening their grip or loosening it? Wrapping a dim soul with more accoutrements or shining like the sun, eager to shed its shell and come into its true destiny?

growing the soul

How is your soul growing, and how does affect your relationship with the externals? Whether you’re moving houses or not, how might you be sensing the invitation to lighten your load?

serving the world

If you’re in your second half, the things you have accumulated likely need to be redistributed to those more needy. Open your heart to that possibility and see where the Spirit leads!

takeaway

Lighter is better.