The theme of letting stuff go keeps popping up of late. We recently looked at letting our actual stuff go. Letting go of the pursuit of the perfect investment. In short, letting stuff go is powerful in a world where adding seems to be the default. Below you can find quotes from five recent posts on the topic of the power of letting things go.

Phil Pearlman on How to Make Your Life Less Hectic talks about this very problem.

“We have so many useless things we have accumulated over the years. We get used to them and we become insensitive to how they negatively affect the quality of our lives. Plus, we just hate letting things go.”

Ben Katt, author of The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness in Midlife, on leaving old roles behind.

“When you leave behind the roles that have defined you for so long—by choice or unwillingly—you are plunged into the unknown. It’s lonely and disorienting. While the accompaniment of a partner, friend, therapist, or spiritual director is critical as you walk through the darkness, nature is also a powerful ally.”

Joy Lere at Finding Joy on the tyranny of the to-do list and what happens when we get off track.

“The reality is that many of the tasks we spend so much time and energy worrying about don’t matter as much as we think they do, especially when we adjust our time perspective. The most important things in our lives don’t involve emails, meetings, reports, and spreadsheets—they’re our relationships.”

Austin Frakt in the Incidental Economist on dealing with a life-changing medical condition.

“The wind did what wind does. The condition takes what the condition takes. We all experience conditions, struggles, turmoil. The problem is not in the wind or the conditions we face, but in our resistance, our coveting, our hoarding, our yearning, our attachments. We’re so attached to ourselves. (Buddha’s been telling us this on social media for thousands of years.)”

Anne Lamott in the Washington Post the superpower of letting go as we get older.

“When you’re young and vigorous, convinced you are powerful, you have the energy to try to self-will your problems into submission, and it usually makes them worse. By 60 or so, you’ve had enough of participating in the Punch and Judy show of trying to get things to turn out the way you’re positive they should. You’ve learned to surrender. Otherwise, you’ll always be pissed off and exhausted, and that’s no way to live out whatever years you have left.”

Time is all we have. Do you really want to spend it on things that stopped mattering a long time ago?