As regular readers can attest, I have written for years here about how Linda and I downsized our lives in order to upsize our lifestyles and “live large with less.” And central to that process has been our intentional paring of possessions to our favorite ones. As a result, even gargantuan tasks like whittling our library from more than 1500 volumes down to as little as 15 has not felt like a huge sacrifice because we thoughtfully limited our selections to ones we loved.

And I have long followed the journey of another couple pursuing a similar path over at Innermost Life, where the other day I read a thought provoking post titled “The Art of Love: How I Came to An Innermost Life” by Diana Lorence. In it she shares the story of how she and her husband, Michael, have sought to simplify their lives the same way. As she writes, “There are two ways to simplify your life. One way is eliminating the things from your life that don’t really matter, until you are left with what you need.

The other way is the art of filling your life with what you love most in the world. Love has a strange emancipating power that lets everything else fall away…If you make a way to live with what you truly love—not just with what you happen to have or want—then you may find yourself simply leaving everything else behind,” she writes. It is this principle that seems to be the missing ingredient in many people’s recipe for simplifying their life.

The bottom line is whether or not you choose to move as often as us (a dozen times) or the Lorences (a couple dozen times), you can still benefit from streamlining your stuff using love as the litmus test for what to treasure and what to trash. My elderly mother just moved hundreds of miles after living almost two decades in one place and as tough as it was for her it was helpful to limit items to ones she cherished enough to pack, store, and unpack between homes. So, wherever you are on your journey of life identify what you love and try leaving the rest behind.