The Journey

One message that was driven home for me over and over during the course of the Downsizing Challenge was that the journey is just as important as the destination.

This fact hung in my mind today as we launched a brand new school here in Denver. We opened the doors of SOAR Charter School to 240 eager kindergarten, first, and second grade students and their families.

I could go on and on about what makes SOAR different from a traditional public school or why I am so excited to be a part of it, but it is most easily summed up by this:

The journey is just as important as the destination.

In an age of school accountability in which school performance is measured in one way (by a narrow set of standardized test scores), it is an act of subversion to say that HOW we teach matters. To say, "Yes we will teach our children to score well on those tests but we will not sacrifice their dignity, their autonomy, their creativity to do so," is a radical call to action.

Just call us radicals.

At our school, the most important question a parent can ask their child isn't "What did you learn today?" but, rather, "How did you feel about your learning today?"

How the children get to the end of their school careers is just as important as what they know when they get there.

Likewise, a year ago I could have torn through my house, found 365 things I could live without, and lugged them off to the dump. There, a year of downsizing in just one afternoon.

But, of course, such an action would have completely missed the point. Indeed, throughout the year, I met several people who, after hearing about the challenge, said something like, "Oh, I do that, too. Every spring I get rid of a bunch of stuff."

Which is to say that THEY DON'T DO ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY CONNECTED TO THE DOWNSIZING CHALLENGE. To commit to a process, to say I shall make this a part of my daily life and learn and grow and change because of it is completely different than just throwing a big pile of stuff out.

The Downsizing Challenge was a wonderful way for me to get in touch with my life journey over the course of the year. The fact that I rid myself of some PEZ dispensers, firewood, or a record collection really doesn't matter.

What matters is that I've had a heck of a lot of fun along the way.

The bottom line

Six dollars and seventy-three cents per day.

Over the last year, my downsizing gig payed $6.73 a day. Not bad, I don't think.

Sure, if I had to support a family on it, things would be a little tight, but, considering that it was all supplemental income, I think it's commendable.

Since the beginning, I've tracked what my downsizing sales have taken in, but I never kept a running tally. I had a few requests along the way to publish what I had made so far, but never got around to doing the math.

I rarely get around to doing math.

I also spent a fair amount, too, mostly in postage, but I didn't even bother to keep formal records on that.

Note to my cousin Amy, who has embarked on her own Downsizing Challenge: I recommend keeping a running budget along the sidebar of your blog. Folks love to peek into your financials.

Curious, myself, about what my final take was, I've spent the last two evenings meticulously going through the archives to add up all that I made and subtract all that I spent. Here, are the positive and negative sides of the ledger:

Income

• Craigslist: $1,135
• eBay: $728 (after subtracting eBay and PayPal fees)
• Other: $329.05 (mostly two big sales of cloth diapers to friends)
• Yard Sale: $300
• Bull Moose Music: $85.62
• Returns: $30.34
• TOTAL: $2,608.01

Outgo

• Postage: $111.75 (that's a really rough estimate)
• Chemical recycling: $40
• TOTAL: $151.75

That leaves me with a net gain of $2,456.26 or, as mentioned above, an average of $6.73 a day.

The number would be far more impressive if I also included the profit from the sale of our house, but that seems to transcend the spirit of these other sales, so I've left it out. Besides, I don't want the IRS to know what we actually made on that deal.

I was rather shocked to see the craigslist total, but it certainly shows how the internet has made marketing and sales accessible to anyone. A market out there exists for just about anything, and services like craigslist can help anyone access it. Most impressive is that every cent of craigslist sales went into my pocket.

eBay, while allowing us to tap into a far larger market, has the downside of a) charging a commission for using the service, and b) necessitating shipping, which eats into profits. Thus, I was a little surprised that I didn't net more than $728. If I could have sold those same items for the same price on craigslist, the total would have been somewhere in the $1,100 range. Oh, what could have been.

What I don't regret is the money I spent on postage ($111.75) as I mailed downsized items to friends and family. By my count, I had at least twenty-eight days on which I mailed off something to someone, usually without even telling them it was coming. Every time I did it, I envisioned the fun they would have opening the surprise package. In this electronic age, I think we all get a special thrill out of physical mail arriving on our doorstep. I would have gladly spent double that in order to spread those emotions.

I certainly didn't enter the downsizing challenge with the intent of profiting from it, but in the end I actually feel like I made out like a bandit. After all, a year ago, if someone had offered me six dollars a day to maintain a blog, I would have jumped at the chance. Have fun and make money? Sign me up!

Plus, once I finally sell the book rights to this experience, I'm really going to be rolling in the Benjamins.

Just a little off

When I first started the blog, I envisioned keeping track of the types of downsizes I completed.

I quickly discovered that even the free Blog sites are amazingly versatile. I, naturally, am partial to Blogger, but there are many others -- I encourage you to shop around before you begin your blog tomorrow, Dear Readers.

A little experimentation revealed that I could add links, pictures, opportunities for people to "follow" me, track visitors, and even include a year-long countdown on my front page. What I could not do, at least not without an advanced degree from MIT, was create a simple bar graph that visually represented how I was downsizing. From the first day I included a side bar entitled How am I downsizing? in which I categorized that day's downsize. I always intended to switch that over to a more impressive bar graph, but could never figure out how.

As a side note, I made the choice early on to count all of the downsizes from a given day only once. My rationale was that the challenge was, at it's heart, more about doing something daily than ridding myself of a set number of items. Plus, when I recycled an entire box of old school files on Day 2, I couldn't figure out whether that should count as one or a thousand. Easier to stick with the ol' binary code.

This meant that on days when I downsized in multiple ways -- such as both trashing and recycling items -- I needed to make a call about which category in which to count the event. I generally defaulted to the category that had the larger number of items.

Yesterday, after taking a few days off from blogging -- oh, sweet freedom! -- I tallied up my How am I downsizing? chart to discover, highly unsurprisingly, that the numbers didn't add up to the 365 days of the challenge. My Masters Degree may be in literacy, but I do know that 364 does not equal 365.

This led me to pull out a yellow table and, over an hour, go back through every post to determine the definitive How am I downsizing? totals.

With the blog numbers corrected, I took a few moments to ponder the tally. Here are a few observations:

• Precisely one-third of my downsizing days (121) involved giving things away. Being a giver feels good.


• Another eight percent of the downsizes (28) were donations, meaning that over forty percent of my days in the last year have involved giving things to others with the intention of helping or pleasing them. Being a giver feels very good.


• Fifteen percent (55) of my items were recycled. The issue here is that as important as we all know recycling is, I think we still don't really know what it is. I put things in a magical plastic bin, they go off to some mysterious facility and the world's solid waste and global warming problems are solved? Ah, I don't think so.

Which brings me to...

• My second most frequently used method of downsizing was tossing stuff into the trash. On nineteen percent of the days (69), I just threw crap out. While I am willing to take full responsibility for this travesty, it speaks loud and clear about how we are still far too entrenched in a consumer-culture built within a disposable world. I clearly need to redouble my efforts to launch a campaign centered around pushing companies to take more responsible for helping us to recycle the products they profit from. Please vote for me.

But, regardless of how I downsized, at least the numbers add up to 365.

The day after

What a wonderful day. While I carry the lessons of Downsizing with me, it was rather pleasant to not have to think, for one moment, about what I would get rid of today. And, in fact, I didn't get rid of a thing.

Rather, I spent a delightlful day with my Beautiful Bride and Brilliant Son. We walked around the farmer's market, splashed about in the swimming pool, and had dinner with friends.

There's still plenty of downsizing in my future -- turns out that once you start looking, there's plenty to get rid of -- but it doesn't have to happen daily, and I don't need to write about it. I do, however, have a number of wrap-up posts that I will be writing. I hope, Dear Readers, that you will stick around for those.

In the meantime, I am absolutely giddy with excitement over this little annoucement. My cousin Amy, one of my most loyal followers and frequent commenters, has launched her own year-long downsizing quest.

That's right, downsizing lives on!

She didn't even miss a day -- her challenge began today. So, Dear Readers, blow this popsicle joint and get over to Amy's blog: Downsizing Too.

I bet it promises to be an even more entertaining year than I gave you.