The H writes...
It turns out that adjusting your life from I’m going to stay in one place for the foreseeable future to I won’t have anywhere to call home for the foreseeable future is something that dawns on you really slowly. I’ve labeled myself a socialist ever since I’ve been able to string a coherent set of social-philosophical thoughts together, but between you and me, I haven’t really been living up to that tattoo on my shoulder. I, too, like so many of us, have gotten caught up in the world where buying is better than saving, where owning a shiny thing is an easy way to happiness.
No wonder, perhaps; I used to be the editor of T3.com, and was used to surrounding myself with the hottest, newest, and shiniest of gadgets. Living in a bizarre world where a 5 month old item is barely worth a second look, and where the solution to most problems is to reach for your credit card sounds like everything but an utopia; and yet, preparing for a long period of travel has made me realise that, really, in the cold light of day, that is what I’ve been doing the past ten years.
From Gadget-o-naut to 4 boxes and a backpack
Don’t get me wrong. I love a well-designed piece of kit. I admire my MacBook Pro almost every day for how much better it is than anything the Microsoft-powered world has been able to cobble together. I was a ridiculously early adopter of the iPhone, mostly because it was the first phone that would actually sync (gasp) with my Mac (oooh). Not only did it work; it worked well. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; and well-designed gadgets are pure, distilled magic.
And yet, as I’m adjusting to the idea that I’ll be living out of a backpack for a long time to come, I can’t help but think ‘where the hell did all this crap come from’. Less than ten years ago, I moved to England with only a backpack worth of things , and now I have all sorts. Expensive items. Bulky items. Items with sentimental value.
‘If your house was on fire…’
If I were faced with the question ‘If your house was burning, and you could bring with you one suitcase of things’, it would be very easy to respond to. I own very few things that are irreplaceable (some art, my ‘memory box’, and a solid set of backups of the photographs I’ve taken). Can ‘my life’, as I seem to define it most of the time, really be completely replaced by heading for a sizable shopping mall with a credit card? To a large degree, the answer is ‘yes’, which, let’s face it, is a really bloody depressing prospect.
A sad realisation indeed.
That, alone, is a reason to shed whatever I’m carrying around with me for no good reason, and head out into the world. Maybe it is time to find out what life is really about; beyond saving up money for a better motorcycle, an iPhone 4, or other shiny things.
Who would have thought; Fight Club got one thing eerily right. Tyler Durden, in a moment of clarity back in the late 1990s, muttered that “The things you own end up owning you”.
Preparing for the upcoming traveling seem to be a fantastic way of shaking off the things, and start owning myself again.
It may sound corny, but even though I haven’t started this journey with as much as a single step, it feels as if it has made my life better already.
