It’s been said that if your dream doesn’t scare you, then it’s too small. What is the passion you have that is deep inside you, the “why that makes you cry?” What is the dream you have that no one knows but you?
In this Part Two of my two part interview with Rita Wilkins, the “Downsizing Designer,” learn how clutter might be getting in the way of your dreams. Listen to the show in using the player below, and go here for more details about Rita and her work.
New from Brant Huddleston
Show Overview
In Part One of my interview with Rita Wilkins, the “Downsizing Designer,” we learned how a trip to Africa shook up Rita’s world and led her to a new lifestyle paradigm, one where she shed 95% of her stuff in exchange for more time, money, and freedom in a much smaller apartment in Philadelphia. We talked a fair bit about how such shake-ups can come at a cost to relationships, and that’s where we pick up in this Part Two of our talk.
But in keeping with my penchant for random thought, Rita and I go from there to a freewheeling conversation about stuff, how a bunt cake pan and 40 foot aluminum ladder can lead to communism, the story of the 16 pairs of scissors, and how the shared economy resulted from a mindset shift our children learned from observing Boomer unhappiness with materialism.
Oh, and be sure to stay to the end when Rita and I kick around the idea of a dating website just for people who have moved past that unhappiness and into a “less stuff, more fun” mindset. So please join me for Part Two of my two part interview with Rita S. Wilkins, the “downsizing designer” and author of the book “Downsize Your Life, Upgrade Your Lifestyle: Secrets to More Time, Money, and Freedom.”
Affiliate Disclosure
My guests and I often refer to various resources (e.g. books, products, videos, course etc.), which are offered for sale on this page. While I do make a small commission from the sale of these products, you do not pay a penny more for them! It’s called Affiliate Marketing, and every purchase you make by clicking the links on this page help pay for the show. I hope you find the resources useful, and thanks for your support!
What you will learn from Rita the “Downsizing Designer”:
- The relationship with stuff, How it can affect a relationship, or even break it apart
- A stage of life, and a common vision
- The ABC’s of Downsizing video
- When you sense that something isn’t right. How to move from there to liberty.
- Have the “Why” in mind
- The average American home has 300,000 things in it
- The $24B storage industry is nearly non-existent outside the US
- The sandwich generation is in a quandary: Stay in place with the clutter, or downsize
- Then electric glue gun story
- The 16 pairs of scissors story
- How the shared economy is the real game changer
- The paradigm shift. What we are learning from millennials
- How the bunt cake pan and the 40’ aluminum ladder leads to communism
- How boomers created consumerism
- 10K boomers are retiring every year
- How Boomers are reinventing ourselves. New dreams that we put on hold.
- The Center for the New American Dream
- Marie Kondo
- “Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial MORE” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
- It was a little bit crazy…a desire to do better, be bigger, all of those things. But we desire something much deeper
- Something shifts, Do you want more stuff, or more experiences?
- Our kids do not want our stuff! We have a responsibility!
- The shared economy resulted from a mindset shift our children learned from observing our unhappiness
- Our dating site idea
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
