Book Review: It’s All Too Much – Peter Walsh

 

Christmas time has flown past. The New Year has even fallen. Maybe you’re still wondering where to put all of your new treasures received over the holidays. Perhaps you’re even still trying to figure out where your old belongings would fit best. Here is a little help for you: try reading Peter Walsh’s It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.


You might remember Peter Walsh from TLC’s Clean Sweep. Or even more recently he has been part of Oprah’s Best Life Series. You can sign up for a monthly newsletter with homework assignments and advice through Oprah.com, but if you really want to delve into it all, try borrowing a copy of this book from the library or buying one of your own.
Living with chronic illness complicates your life enough. Having easy access to everything you need and want in life is one of the best gifts you can provide yourself to reduce the number of spoons expended in any amount of time. As an organization-freak, perhaps I am a bit biased, but I truly buy into Walsh’s philosophy borrowed from an 18th century architect William Morris. If you don’t truly believe an item in your household is highly functional or beautiful, then you need to get rid of it. It follows after the old Thoreau truism, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” That doesn’t mean your house needs to be barren of worldly goods. It just means you need to only own what you truly love. If it’s not valuable to you, then why clutter your world with it.
And that’s what this book is all about: decluttering. Removing items offers a peace, serenity, and calmness in your life that allows you to live fluidly. Anything you need is at your disposal. Anything you find creates happiness for you is in ready view. What could be better than that? There is a true purpose to organizing. It’s not to empty your world, but to enrich it.
Walsh provides step-by-step guides from the initial cleanse all of the way through to the day-to-day living after you’ve established your orderly home. He begins with a quiz that allows you to determine the extent of your cluttering habits. He gives you a room-by-room process to purging. Every suggestion is buffered with self-reflection questions for you to answer. He gives real numbers to support his rationale. The book includes worksheets to fill out at your leisure to truly digest what it’ll take to make each room optimized. It’s not a fluff book about the need to get rid of junk. It’s about how to live a fuller, richer life with concrete ways of making it happen. In the end, he gives a month-by-month theme to live by so your organizing ways become a lifestyle rather than something you need to replicate year after year. And the summation of the book is just that, creating a lifestyle that works for you because you’re not overburdened by trivial things that weigh you down. Every spoonie can benefit from that!

Book review written by: Carrie Beth Burns © 2009 butyoudontlooksick.com

  • Sounds like a good read.
    I would add one serious caveat to the whole thing though. Don’t think of it as “simplify your life.” That suggests deprivation and getting rid of things you do find beautiful and useful because someone else thinks they’re luxuries or irrelevant or wants you to give them to them.
    Don’t let other people make those decisions. They don’t understand your physical logistics. Small conveniences that make it easier to get around or do things need to be right where you can get them. I’ve been organizing for decades. I’ve moved several times a year for about 30 years before I finally settled down and got to live in one place for any length of time.
    There wasn’t anything superfluous left in my possessions a long time ago. But there was a lot when I had to leave New Orleans and I made some bad decisions on what to ditch. I kept some recycling materials that were basically free and left behind thousands of dollars in art supplies I needed to replace. I left behind good irreplaceable books, reference books, because I didn’t have the strength to sort through everything to find them… but brought way too many clothes I hated and dragged those around for years.
    Do not let other people tell you “You need this” if you hate it. Do not let them put treasures into the trash if you do love them — even if you haven’t used them in a while and are waiting for the right season or to live somewhere with enough space to set up for it.
    I carried my oils around for four years till I wound up living somewhere with enough space to open them and do oil painting — and I did not have to replace them when I did. So think of the long term like that in terms of storage — things you need right now and things you will want to be in good shape when you’ve got the right logistics worked out.
    Books, tools and things to do are valuable. They’re priceless when you’re home all the time and bored. Organizing stuff like that means getting enough bookcases, containers and tubs.
    If you sort by what you genuinely care about, enjoy and like, you won’t go wrong. And then don’t get cheap about good storage containment because that will save a fortune in replacements.