After working more than two decades in media and marketing I’ve accumulated a lot of tchotchkes.  While the various collectibles and freebies are undoubtedly a fun part of the job, over time all this stuff can become a problem if you are bit of a pack rat, like me. 

A visit to the back corner of our attic or basement storage room is a veritable walk down memory lane of my career:  vintage gear from conferences, team off-sites, and sporting events long past like the Global X Games and BCS (remember the BCS?).  I have enough branded luggage, travel bags and water bottles to supply an expansion team.  And the wearables?  Forget about it, practically an endless supply of t-shirts, golf shirts, sweatshirts, pullovers, and hats. 

Where once six people lived in our home, now most days there is just the two of us.  The empty nest unleashes a wave of emotions, but on a practical level it also makes you reconsider your space.

I got away with my pack rat tendencies for years.  Between work and raising four kids there were always ample excuses for ignoring the growing pile of stuff.  Plus, we didn’t spend much time in the attic or the back room of the basement, so, out of sight, out of mind.  On the rare occasions the topic came up, it was easy to brush off with a “I’ll get to it” throwaway line.

However, once the kids are gone it’s not unusual for parents to become possessed with an overwhelming urge to clean house.  You attack with a vengeance the newly abandoned bedrooms, basement, closets, attic – any other space where toys, old clothes, and other odds and ends gather dust. 

This phenomenon presents a moment of crisis for the pack rats among us.  There are no more weekend tournaments or other time-consuming kid related distractions.  The well of excuses runs dry.  Decisions must be made.  Ultimatums may even be issued by a long-suffering spouse eager to clean house.

Getting over the hump of finally deciding that it’s time to toss or giveaway the five branded beach bags gathering dust in the attic with a logo of a company that ceased to exist in 2016 can be a challenge at first.  But once one takes the first step, cleaning out the old and lightening the load can be very therapeutic.  If one hasn’t used a piece of luggage (or any dust filled collectible sitting in the attic) in a decade, it’s probably a safe bet that you never will.  So why not give it to someone who could use it? 

There’s a good lesson here for our careers.  How many of us are “pack rats” for certain mindsets or ways of operating?  How much of this dusty professional “baggage” are we carrying around without stopping to ask ourselves why?

Maybe we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s too late to change or to learn something new.  Or the slow accumulation of mental debris has us believe that a current job or career path, as unfulfilling as it may be, is the best we can do.  Or the most insidious of all for people in their fifties, we buy in to the notion that our best years are behind us. 

These old habits, uninformed biases, dated perspectives and irrational fears amassed during decades of work can start to fill up all the available space in our minds, like the tchotchkes in the attic.  We become pack rats for needless junk that does nothing but hold us back.

The sad irony is that so many of us allow this pack rat mentality to take root at a stage of our lives when we are at the peak of our powers.  After three decades of accumulating wisdom, work experience, and a strong network of relationships, we are never more primed professionally to do amazing things.  Yet too often we allow the pile of unnecessary stuff to weigh us down.  As a result, we settle for less, become risk averse, and dismiss new possibilities.

This mentality can sneak up on us, like the slow but steady growth of stuff in our attics.  We arrive at a place where we accept things we never would have imagined when we were young.  We acquiesce, succumb to the weight of all our collected junk, settle under duress.  Not because it’s what we really want, but because we’ve convinced ourselves it’s the best we are going to get.  You can hear it in our rationalizations when circumstances change. 

It’s the executive who just got laid off saying, “who’s going to hire me at this stage?”  Or the employee who feels stuck in a job they don’t enjoy who says, “it sucks but I don’t have much of a choice.”  Our motivation to get out of bed every morning to go to work is not to do something that fulfills or challenges us, but a countdown to when we will reach the finish line.  There are people I know who are counting down to retirement ten years out – TEN YEARS! – holding on for dear life in jobs they dread.

Believe me, I understand that these choices can get very complicated as we get older.  No one should act recklessly with their finances or careers.  We have a responsibility to ourselves and the people depending upon us not to make rash, selfish decisions.  At the same time, life is too short and unpredictable to sleep-walk through most of our waking hours waiting for a day that may never come.  We only get one lap around the track.

Much of this mindset is driven by fear, for sure.  But there’s another, equally insidious force at work:  a failure of our imaginations.  All the debris we’ve gathered over the years clogs our minds and spirits to such an extent that there’s no room to consider anything else.  We can’t see past all the junk to consider new possibilities for ourselves.  Rather than seizing the moment when the bell sounds for what could be an amazing second act of our lives, we stay on the bench because our smothered imaginations prevent us from seeing other options.

Rooting out these corrosive mindsets takes hard work.  It makes even cleaning the most cluttered attic feel like a walk in the park.  But the payoff is also that much greater.  Letting go of the things that weigh us down sparks our creativity and strengthens our wills in powerful ways. 

Combine this lightening of the load with the decades of hard-earned experience and wisdom and suddenly we may find ourselves more formidable than ever, taking on new challenges and embracing new opportunities.

Yes, it can be unsettling and scary.  Change always is.  But for my money it beats the alternative, which is to accept the mindless monotony of the rat race where even though we may still have a pulse, for most our waking hours we already have one foot in the grave.

Let me be clear:  this is a journey, not a destination.  I’m not writing a postcard from the promised land; this is more like a snapshot from the road.  To be honest, I write about this stuff in part to remind myself why fighting this battle everyday matters.

To that end, the attic still needs work.  I have more stuff to sort through.  The nest may be empty but it’s not free of clutter yet.  As I write this, I’m wearing a worn ESPN pullover under the watchful gaze of my red penguin.  Old habits die hard.  Like all my fellow pack rats seeking to lighten the load, I’m determined to continue to discard the junk weighing me down to make the most of this next, exciting phase of life.  But that penguin isn’t going anywhere.