Ware Ciji - Rightsizing your life: simplifying your surroundings while keeping what matters most

Copyright 2006 by Ciji Ware

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Springboard Press

Hachette Book Group

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First eBook Edition: January 2007

The Springboard Press name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-446-50717-2

This book is dedicated to Tony Cook,

my husband of three decades with

whom I have shared the partnership of a lifetime.

We did, indeed, get it right.

Gail Sheehy

A dozen years ago, when my husband and I graduated into the vagabond years, I wish we'd had Ciji Ware's book. We were bare-nesters, neither of us tethered to a nine-to-five job, but shaken by a battle with serious illness into thinking about how to pursue our passions.

Lifelong New Yorkers, we sold our Manhattan apartment and lit out for a sojourn on the opposite coast, where my husband started a new career as a teacher at the University of California, Berkeley. We bought a house in the Berkeley hills and felt our vistas stretch across the Bay to the Atlantis of San Francisco as it arose from the foggy sea each morning. We could see all the way to the vast Pacific. It felt like a rebirth.

For one brief magical moment in the go-go nineties, we entertained the fantasy that we were flush enough to own two homes and rent a third. I remember the apogee of that fantasy.

Writer friends, whose cash flow was as mercurial as ours, rented a castle in the Chianti country of Italy and invited their network of New York and LA pals to share the high life for a week in June. We all dressed like guests in The Garden of the Finzi Continis. We took aperitifs in the vineyard; wined and dined by candlelight in the great room; repaired for espresso to the salon. Photos were taken immortalizing each couple in the romantic archways of the portico. Dreams were spun of reproducing an Italian villa in a New York exurb (and one of our number actually managed to do that). We were all still working and at the top of our games, and we all had investments. Hell, half of America was in the stock market, trading tips on mutual funds with their auto mechanics and supporting one another's belief that a 17 percent return rate was normal.

At one point our host, once a middle-class Jersey City boy, raised a toast: Here's to the dream we never thought would come truewe're living rich!

That prophecy was as ephemeral as the bouquet of a good Beaujolais Nouveau.

Most of us graduated within the next ten years into the more-life-left-to-live-than-you-saved-for stage. Involuntary retirement caught some of us short. Health crises shook others. The surprise Clinton surplus turned into the bulging Bush deficit. But America's economic growth continued to defy the usual forces of inflation and recession, as if the balloon could keep filling and floating upward until it found some hole in the ozone layer that would allow us to spend more than our income, indefinitely.

Despite the fact that wages were not keeping up with inflation, Americans were able to keep consuming by refinancing their mortgages at lower interest rates and turning the rising value of their houses into spendable cash. As New York Times columnist Paul Krug-man summarized the situation, We became a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China.

Now the air is leaking out of the balloon. As the housing market softens, interest rates keep hardening. For people like usover fifty, with most of our equity tied up in a home we lovethere comes a sober moment when we have to get real.

Ciji Ware describes many recognizable variations on that moment. It may never come for the superrich, unless they have their nest egg sliced up by a divorce or death taxes, but it comes for most of us in the shrinking middle and working class. Conventionally, it has been described as downsizing. But by viewing it through that dark lens, we set ourselves up for feeling like victims or failures or the unlucky ones. Couples seek relief in playing the blame game: Why didn't you sell the Lucent stock before it tanked? You were the one who fell for that interest-only mortgage loan and got us sucked into rising rates six months later.

There is another way to look at making necessary changes in our lifestyle in our seasoned years. By the time we are moving into our Second Adulthood (and today that age varies widely, depending on how old we are when our little darlings move out), we have often reached a point of exhaustion. So much effort has gone into operating the incredibly complex switches of that instrument called family life, into building careers, expanding homes, proliferating possessions, we just want to take a deep breath. And if we allow ourselves to breathe awhile, we'll probably feel the counter-urge to pare down, simplify, consolidate, and lighten up.

It's not a question of giving up a way of life. We are now graduating to a stage that allows us to pull free from the maintenance work of holding on to a past stage. For women, in particular, reaching the age fifty peak can feel like standing on top of a mountain with a 360-degree view in all directions. We can look back and see the steps we have takenwhen we were on the right road, when we veered off-track. Looking ahead, we see a vista more lengthy than any generation has ever known. It's time to pursue a more passionate life. And that is only possible once we are willing to change.

For my husband and me, one bright light that illuminated our changing priorities came with the birth of our second grandchild. The first grandbaby is an occasion for unlimited indulgence. With number two, second thoughts surface: What about the cost of private schools, music lessons, orthodontia, boarding school; and college loans that saddle the graduates of today with a yoke that puts home-buying out of reach for many years? How will we be able help our adult children if we're not prepared to finance our own extended life spans?

So, like legions of boomers who will follow us, we had to consider cashing in our greatest equitythe houseand paring down on the costs of maintenance. It took us two or three years of hand-wringing and inner and outer conflict before we bit the bullet.

So here we are, as I write this, sitting outdoors on our patio while the prospective buyer makes her fourth excursion through our house over a holiday weekend. Our houseguests and we have been living as if in boot camp, mitering the corners of our bedclothes and using only the corners of our towels, in order to keep the house showable. I'm feeling a combination of sad and madwhy should somebody else have the home I have spent thirty years nurturing into our ideal nest?

I feel better when I anticipate the weightlessness of not carrying the small army of tree pruners and pool cleaners and gutter muckrakers and grass mowers and mole/vole catchers and on and on. We have begun nursing a brand-new fragile-as-a-bubble dream of buying a little dock on the bay, with a smaller house, and a lot less land. We both love looking out at the water. And you don't have to mow water. I could have a rowboat and a kayak to entertain my grandchildren.

Still, I'm fighting clingitis. The house has never looked so close to perfect, but I can't leave it alone. I'm constantly shifting throw pillows and turning the comforters and cutting flowers for every room, despite nature's chandeliers of white wisteria just outside the windows and bouquets of rhododendron pushing over the sills. I'm like a mother overdressing her children for the holidays.