Kara and I are back in the Houston area, where we’ve been doing some... shifting.
First, we came back to the area primarily to get to our three storage units, in an effort to consolidate them down to one. This turned out to be a little impractical—we still own a lot of stuff.
It’s a “problem” we’ve been dealing with for awhile now, but it’s become more prominent as we’ve stared making a move to be more minimalist in how we live. And I put “problem” in quotes because, when it comes down to it, having a bunch of stuff crammed into a storage unit isn’t that big of a deal. We’re just like millions of other Americans. More wealth than we can carry with us.
But it’s quote-problem-quote because we’re aiming for that more minimalist approach to living. There’s something we’ve discovered, since getting on the road, that makes having multiple storage units—or even a single storage unit—a quote-problem-quote. It has less to do with the stuff and more to do with what the stuff means to us.
Those storage units contain a lot of old memories. Nostalgia, in some cases. But in others it’s just... weight.
As I was moving around furniture and crates and boxes, I made a joke I’ve made before: “Why is everything we own heavy?”
There’s a sutra in that question.
As Kara and I have transitioned to living full time out of a small space, forced to travel light because we simply can’t carry everything with us, it’s started to dawn on us that the less we have to be concerned about, physically, the less concerned we feel, psychologically. The weight of all that stuff starts to slough off, and we start to feel free.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve ended up spending more time messing around with the storage units than we first intended. We’re starting to look at “owning things” in a new way. For one, we’re starting to realize that for awhile now it’s our stuff that’s owned us, not the other way around.
Case in point: We’re paying for three storage units, to house a bunch of stuff that is a mix of things we care about and things that we don’t. We’re paying money for it to sit there, unused. Most of it we’ve wanted to replace or dispose of for a long while.
So... joke’s on us. Our stuff has us right where it wants us.
When we first got back to Houston I took a week off to just start ploughing through the bigger of the three storage units, with the goal of emptying it entirely. It was harder than I anticipated, because all that stuff kept reminding me of reasons to keep it. “You might need this thingy some day. Wouldn’t this doohickey be handy under the right circumstances? This is a jigamabob that you got from person X... you wouldn’t want them to think you’re ungrateful!”
I’m a contingency kind of guy. Call it Boy Scout preparedness—I like to keep resources handy, just in case. Tools, materials, equipment, you name it. I still have junk I picked up in my teens.
So many things I own are there for contingencies.
The trouble is, those contingencies rarely happen. And though it’s nice to have a few things on hand that I can use to solve problems, it’s a rare day indeed when I need to dig through The Box of Many Wires and retrieve that old cable that I kept from a gaming system I haven’t had since 1992.
So, tough as it was, Kara and I started making the hard decisions, and letting a lot of our stuff go.
Donation bins are currently bulging with my contingency items, as well as clothes and shoes I don’t have room for, tools I have in triplicate, video equipment that hasn’t worked since the first President Bush was in office, and so forth.
We managed to cull things down from three storage units to just two.
That may not sound like a huge leap forward, but it did wonders for taking some of the weight off of our shoulders. It’s a good start. And it really is just that—a start. Our plan is to come back periodically and do more clearing in the storage units, until one day, finally, we should be rid of a second one. And then, maybe, we’ll try downsizing the third one. I’d love to get that pile down to about half the size of one of those units.
To be sure, there are things we’ll always hold on to. Kara’s grandmother left us some very nice antique furniture that we want to put in a forever home some day. I have certain studio gear that I want to use in that same home, in a dedicated studio space. There are various items that have nostalgic value for us. But if we are honest and diligent with culling this stuff down, I think we’ll find ourselves feeling less weighted down by it.
Less mental weight to slow us down as we travel through the world and experience life. Less weight to hold me back as I write and produce more books and content. That’s just good for everyone.
And as a part of going more minimalist... we’re downsizing our living space.
A little over a week ago we took a leap and traded the truck and travel trailer for a travel van.
Effectively, we cut our living in space in half, meaning we have to carry even less with us as we travel the US.
#VanLife
The people who know about this already have been surprised and, I think, a little delighted by the move. It’s tough to figure out, I know. We had a hard time envisioning this at first ourselves. But now...
So the progression was to first sell our four-bedroom, 2500 square-foot home and moving into a one-bedroom apartment. Then we moved into a 38-foot motorhome. Then we moved back into a two-bedroom apartment, then to a three-bedroom apartment. And then we downsized back into a travel trailer. And now we’re living in a van that has roughly 120 square-feet of living space.
Go figure.
Downsizing has definitely forced us to be more minimalist, but it’s also forced us to be more creative with what we do carry. Everything has to serve more than one purpose, for example. Things also have to be moved from place to place in what my friend Joe Russo calls “the van shuffle.” (See Joe & Kait Russo’s own van life/camper life adventures at https://weretherussos.com). It’s a bit of work, and a huge shift in mindset. But it’s... well, it’s oddly fun. And, even better, it’s oddly freeing.
We live in this tiny space, but our lives just got a lot bigger.
I’ll be covering more about van life and our adventures on the road in future posts, as we learn and grow into this. But Kara and I are excited about all of this. And Mini, despite pouting a little at first, has gotten into her own groove.
We’re living smaller and it’s making our lives so much larger. I can’t wait to see where we grow from here.