The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 130 - Letting Go

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, listeners. Before we get to this week's episode, I have to tell you that we recorded this all the way back in October of 2020, which feels like a million lifetimes ago at this point. We had uploaded the episode to our editing folder, and for some reason, it just sat there untouched until a couple weeks ago when we were cleaning out the archives and found this long lost episode, listened back to it, and thought, "Huh, this still feels pretty relevant." So, we have decided to release it. We hope you enjoy this blast from our past. And while I have your attention, this is your friendly reminder to please subscribe to our Box O' Goodies. This is our weekly email that we send out with each episode with some additional ideas, and links, and resources pertaining to that week's episode. You can find the subscribe button at thelongandtheshortpodcast.com. And if you would be so kind as to rate and review our podcast on iTunes, we would so appreciate it. It helps other people to find the podcast. Thanks in advance for doing that for us. And now, on to this week's episode.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: I am coming at you from my kitchen in New York City. After seven months of having not been here.

Pete: She's back. She's back, folks. And I get to sit here and watch you prepare dinner again, which I've missed doing over the last seven months.

Jen: Well, if I had opened up my kitchen cabinets for you, you might have noticed that they are less full than they used to be. And that's actually what I'd like to talk about today: both literally and figuratively, what it means to let go of things you've been holding on to.

Pete: Mmm. As a minimalist, I'm intrigued about this, Jen. Because you, I believe, are a bit of a hoarder. So let's talk about it. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Alright now, let's first get one thing clear. I am a maximalist.

Pete: As distinct from a hoarder. You're right. Sorry, I incorrectly identified you.

Jen: Ah, okay. So I really do want to talk about this, both literally and figuratively. So literally, as we were preparing to come back to New York, my daughter and I decided to binge watch a show called Getting Organized With the Home Edit on Netflix. And we started talking about how much stuff we had accumulated over the years, and how in the last seven months, the only things we really missed...? Well, for me, it was my books. And for my daughter, it was her books and her stuffed animals. And other than that, we really weren't attached to anything. So we made this commitment that when we got back to New York, we would get rid of stuff. And my husband was in on this too. I don't want to leave him out of this. So we got back to New York, and in the first twenty-four hours that we were there, we got rid of sixteen giant garbage bags worth of stuff and dropped it off at a donation center. But that was in the first twenty-four hours, and it hasn't stopped. Just every day, we open things up and get rid of things that we just don't need, and it has been quite a liberating experience.

Pete: Sixteen bags...I am gobsmacked.

Jen: Right? I mean, you can't even believe that sixteen bags of stuff fit into a New York City apartment.

Pete: I just realized, once upon a time (I think it was in the early days, it must have been the first twenty episodes), we did an episode called Tidying Up. Do you remember that?

Jen: I do. I do. We were talking about Marie Kondo.

Pete: That's right. And I feel like you pushed back a little bit. So, I'm like curious to see...you've maybe not necessarily adopted Marie Kondo's approach, but back to the idea of, or the notion of tidying up.

Jen: I'm not anti-tidying up, I'm anti-getting rid of my books. That was really what was at the heart of my resistance there. And the truth is, in seven months, that was the thing I missed. So, good thing I didn't tidy up those books. Well, we didn't end up using the Marie Kondo approach, although we did fold our shirts that way. But we used Gretchen Rubin's work from her book, Outer Order, Inner Calm, which I just find so simple. And it's really not that emotionally driven. So, you ask yourself three questions. "Do I need it? Do I use it? Do I love it?" And if the answer to any of those three is "yes", you keep it. And if the answer to all three of those, "Do I use it? Do I need it? Do I love it?", if the answer to all three of those is "no", you get rid of it. And that's how we ended up with sixteen bags of stuff in the first twenty-four hours.

Pete: Wild. And what do you notice, Jen, having gotten rid of sixteen bags of stuff?

Jen: I still have so much more to go. But I realized that a lot of the stuff I was holding on to was fear based. Like, the reason I was holding on to things was really fear based. Like for example, I had all of these old statements, like bank statements, credit card statements. And all of that was sort of like the fear that at some point, I would need to like pull those all together. Like, what if I get audited? Or something to that effect. But the truth is, I have all of those as digital statements online. So, I didn't need to keep those. There were some things that I held on to for fear of identity theft. And it's like, "Well, shred them." Or, things that I held on to for fear that I would miss them. Or, for fear that they would somehow create some magical power to have a use in my life that they have never had before. And the distance away from all of my stuff gave me the opportunity to really get real with the things I was holding on to, and that I didn't need them, I didn't use them, and I didn't love them. So, I had to let them go.

Pete: I think tidying up and looking around at the things that we have in our house is one of the most obvious examples of the sunk cost fallacy, when we see something that we once spent money on and we were like, "But I spent money on it. I can't get rid of it. I bought that thing. What if I need it down the track?" The reframe around the sunk cost fallacy, one way of thinking about it can be: if someone were to gift you this right now, would you keep it? Would you use it? Would you need it? As opposed to, because past Pete bought this thing, he now feels like he needs to keep it. So yeah, I feel like you're describing (in lovely detail) the sunk cost fallacy.

Jen: So as you can imagine, I've been looking for the metaphor of life in cleaning out the closets. And I realize that I, and you, and everybody listening right now, we have things that we are holding on to, stories we tell ourselves, old identities that we don't actually identify with anymore, toxic relationships, or even not toxic, just neutral relationships. And when you ask yourself the question, for example, about the story I'm telling myself, "Do I need it?" No. "Do I use it?" Not to advance myself, not to make progress. And, "Do I love it?" Hell no.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: So, I've got to let it go.

Pete: I feel like every listener (and myself included) feels a little called out. Because you're right, we all have a previous story, or identity, or relationship, or friendship, or whatever, that is taking up not physical space, but space in our brain nonetheless, and is unlikely to be serving us.

Jen: Yeah. I've done some like serious unpacking (pun intended) of what this looks like. I'm happy to give like a real life example here. So for the last seven months, the story I have been telling myself is that I have to be working every moment of every single day. And I need to let that go in order to move forward. Another story I had been telling myself is that I don't really need to like step back and meditate right now. I have too much going on, I don't need to take the time to practice more self care. And then when I sort of heard myself say that...I actually said it out loud in a class once where someone was like, "Can you talk a bit about your self care practice?" And I was like, "I'm not the poster child for self care, so ask someone else." Like, I didn't say it like that, but that was like basically the vibe. And I was like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that." And so I have to ask myself, what's that story about? "I'm not the poster child for self care." Like, what is that story? Do I need that story? No. Do I love that story? No. Like, it's got to go.

Pete: Yeah. There's a great saying around meditation that I've always loved. Which is, "If you find yourself saying, 'I don't have time to do ten minutes of meditation,' you probably need an hour of meditation." I'm paraphrasing that, but it's along those lines. If you don't have time for, you know, ten minutes of it, you need like a couple hours of it if that's your story. And I feel like it's, yeah, it's hard to hear but very, very true. I feel like, I mean, I can definitely relate to all of these stories that you tell yourself, because I feel like I do too. Like the the one that comes to mind for me is the story around striving, which I've kind of been unpacking a bit with my therapist actually. Around like, what she's done is basically (like a good coach) she's just asked a bunch of questions to me, held space for me to help me see my default is to just like strive. I feel like a lot of people maybe listening to this podcast could relate because we talk about growth mindset, and we talk about always trying to be a little bit better, and making ourselves better humans. And I think so much of that serves us. Like, to your point, we should always be doing some form of self care, because it serves us. And yet, there's almost like this other side to striving. Which is, in a way, like never being satisfied because you're always seeking the next thing, or the next goalpost, or the next client, or whatever. And I've recognized that there's a story somewhere in there that I'm still trying to sort of like, to your point, put in a box and like maybe get rid of, around striving. Because it's not always serving me.

Jen: Mmm. That is so interesting. It's sort of making me want to go back and ask these three questions again, because the way Gretchen Rubin lays this out in her book is, if the answer to all of the questions is "no", you have to let it go. But if the answer to any of the questions is "yes", you get to hold on to it. So like, when you think about striving, do you use it? Yes. Do you need it? Sometimes. Do you love it? And it sounds like maybe the answer to that is "no". (I don't want to put words in your mouth.) But she would say that you get to keep that. But then the question, to once again move the literal into the figurative, is, where do you put it? Like, it can't just be out all the time without a proper place to be stored, so that it's constantly reminding you that it's there and you haven't done anything with it. But instead, like, where do you actually put it? What boxes go in which closet of the mind?

Pete: I like that. Because then it's: knowing where it is, you know when to use it. Which I think is the work of certainly this particular example. And maybe it wasn't a great one, in terms of one that I need to get rid of. Because I think you're right, I think like a healthy dose of striving has served me. And does serve me in that, you know, this podcast comes about because we strove to create something that hadn't been created before. And so, it's not actually a story that I want to get rid of necessarily. You're right. It's something that I need to find a spot for, and know when to use. Huh. Curious.

Jen: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so turning this in on the, "I'm not a poster child for self care," which we've determined I have to let go of, but self care as a concept. Do I need it? Yes. Do I use it? Sometimes. Do I love it? No. But I answered "yes" to one of the questions, which means I probably need to hold on to it, and find a place to put it.

Pete: Mmm. I mean, the first thing that came to my mind when you introduced that framework in this episode is, the one "yes" feels so generous.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Because I feel like whether it's metaphorical cleaning or physical cleaning, (I speak for myself only), I feel like I could pretty easily justify a "yes" to one of them. And so it feels like it almost lets you off the hook a little, to say if you just say "yes" to one of them, you get to keep it. Like I was like, "Oh, that seems like too generous." I feel like it should be a little more like, you know, if you said "yes" to all three of them, for sure, keep it. But maybe this is my like, you know, ruthless, physical minimalist coming in where I'm like, "Only own the things that you actually use."

Jen: Well, okay, so back to my Marie Kondo resistance...which some listeners, P.S., like really generously reframed for me, which maybe we could unpack on a different episode. But part of my resistance was the idea of, "Does this bring you joy?" Because I don't want everything I own to bring me joy.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.

Jen: Not that I don't want to be a joyful person. But like, I'm thinking about this book (which one of the folks in the Big Ideas Lab referenced today), this book Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas, which I've mentioned a couple times on this podcast. That book brings me no joy, it brings me pain and sorrow. I lose sleep over it. And I want to keep it because I want to keep investigating all of the ideas in it, but it brings me no joy. So if I was using the other method, I would have to get rid of it. But in this case, it's like, "Do I love it?" No. "Do I need it?" No. But do I...well, actually, I probably do need it. And, "Do I use it?" Yes. I just used it talking about it right now.

Pete: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's no surprise that this framework appeals to you more, because it's three questions and you're a Questioner. I feel like it's very much aligned to, I mean, again, Gretchen Rubin and her Tendencies. Like, it's almost...it feels like it favors the Questioner.

Jen: Yeah. I was just going to say that it feels sort of like a middle ground for the skeptics.

Pete: Mmm. Mmm. Yeah. Skeptics, i.e. a Questioner.

Jen: Yeah, I was just going to say, hence Questioner.

Pete: Yeah, interesting.

Jen: So, I think that my next step in this apartment...we've made a couple runs to the Container Store and such to find places that make a lot more sense to store things. And I've got to work my way through the whole apartment. But then I have to work, similarly, through all of the letting go and keeping that I'm doing in life, to make sure that everything has its proper place so that I can live harmoniously with the environment in which I'm existing.

Pete: Mmm. Can I ask, in going through the things in your apartment, has it surprised you? Like the reality of, "Oh, wow, we have a lot of stuff." Or did you kind of already know?

Jen: Oh, no, no. I knew we had a lot of stuff. I knew we had a lot of stuff.

Pete: Because I was just thinking about the step that comes before all this, I think, is the awareness of your reality.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: And I was thinking about it, sure, from the physical point of view of like, oh, the awareness that I probably have too much stuff. But also, I think if you think about the metaphorical, which I think is so much harder...and I talked about how, you know, I've seen therapists, and I'm sure a lot of people have. That like, the harder reality to get ahold of is like the stories in our head. Like before you even decide whether you can ask yourself those questions, before you even decide whether you can put it in a box and store it somewhere, we actually need to do the work of figuring out, "What's our reality?" And that is like, that's hard emotional labor. And to your point, like the self care one, you had this moment of like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that." That's the reality now. That's the story I'm telling myself. And so it can be kind of fun, and joyful, and like, "I have a lot of stuff," when it's physical. But actually, when it's like metaphorical, it's work. Like, it's emotional labor. I just felt the need to say that out loud.

Jen: I'm so glad that you brought that up, because you're right. All of this is emotional labor. None of this is like just snap your fingers and it's done. It requires digging in. It requires leaning in. It requires courage. It requires the willingness to see things as they are, so that you can see things how they could be and then work toward building toward that version of better.

Pete: Yeah. I think that self-awareness would be the thing that we're all striving for in doing that work. The more self-aware we become of our own reality, the more we can look to change it, live with it, adapt it, be grateful for it, all those things. So, I think what we're ultimately describing is self-awareness.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.