“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with a real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”― Clive Barker
I'm off to Colorado in a few weeks. Three to be exact. I'm really psyched about it - why, I even had some plans of how to make the trip fly by without a hitch. In my wisdom, I thought I'd travel light with nothing but the bare essentials which in my world amounts to nothing more than an iphone. I figured that everything else could be bought while I'm there and recycled back into the system before I come back home. At the most, I thought I'd take a shoulder bag with a shirt, some spare socks and pants but it was pointed out to me today that it would look really suspicious. Which has left me wondering, in what kind of world does not taking anything aboard a plane appear to be suspicious? Seriously, if there's anybody reading that works in airport security, can there even be a grain of truth in this? At first I thought it was nonsense, but the world is so paranoid right now, I'm beginning to doubt my own sane thoughts on this.
The idea of going about as far away from home as I could on a horizontal axis before I started coming back again with nothing but an iPhone is quite appealing. It really floats my sense of minimalism that it is totally possible to work and play in the world without having to rely on anything at all. I heard this again over the weekend, reiterated by somebody on a radio show. "Never own more possessions than you can fit into one suitcase otherwise the possessions will begin to own you." Even that suitcase sounds a bit big for my liking. I really like the sound of 'your pockets' instead of 'suitcase' but that might be rather impractical in the real world. I'll come back to this when I've discovered something I think is a reasonable size but right now, I had best keep my thoughts to myself as I'm still busy archiving a rather large library of books into an easily transportable digital library that lives on the cloud. Once I've got that figured out, I'll be a lot happier about the whole thing... and the irony of my library owning me has already struck home thanks for asking. I'm in transition phase. After that fire a couple of years back, I'm still in awe of how everything you think is important can be taken away from you in less than an hour.
Just to recap on the rules of this, I read an article a few years back about somebody trying to get through life with less than a hundred possessions. I thought this was ridiculously high actually because at the time, I didn't think I had that many (and I didn't) and decided that a more sensible number would be six. Six possessions. This doesn't include stuff like clothes, the tool box, the fridge and the sofa - well, it doesn't for me anyway because they're just things that are useful around the house. I could care less if they weren't there. The six objects need to be things you could put on the front seat of the car, go somewhere else for an extended period of time and carry on living like you hadn't missed a beat. It might be cheating to load an iPad with an entire digital library but being as I can't insure a digital library of books and music against loss or theft, they don't really exist do they. I didn't make the rules, I'm just bending them to suit. Which may raise the question if you can't insure them against loss or theft because they don't exist, how do people steal them? Big industries can't have it both ways can they? Of course they can - who am I kidding.
So far, my possession list is a little weird. I don't need a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone but that's what I've got. Strictly speaking though, only the iPad is mine. Could I get by with it in the absence of the other two? I think I could, but I would need to buy some kind of phone. So that's two possessions right there both of which would allow me to get on with work and pleasure without much of a headache at all. That leaves me with four. I guess one of them would have to be my car without question - which leaves three.
The bicycle maybe? I hit the road for a swift five miles this evening and fell right back into being fourteen years old. Let's throw it in there because I don't see it going away now. That would leave two things - you get the picture. I know nobody has to live like this but I find that I want to. It's amazingly liberating not to want things, not to have to attend to things or be bothered about whether you have these things or not. Better still to not be at the mercy of things. 'Things' do indeed have a habit of owning your ass when you're not looking. Try and get rid of some stuff tomorrow and you'll see what I mean. There's a box of photographs that I haven't finished scanning yet too, but once they are digital, I'll probably look at them more as digital files than I ever will in the box they live in. For some reason though, they appear to be more like memories simply because they are in a box. I wonder sometimes how a head gets to learn things like this.
So given that I don't actually own anything to really speak of, what exactly am I supposed to take to Colorado to make it authentic anyway? Not that it's not authentic - I really don't need anything while I'm there and so don't see the point of taking it in the first place. Socks, pants and a big jumper in case it gets cold? That ought to do it - and maybe that's not such a bad idea anyway.
Footnote: not owning more things than I need doesn't mean I'm not keen on an incredibly healthy bank balance. I think it's important to state that right here and now because you never know when the Gods of Fortune and Fate are reading your blog. Having a minimum amount of 'things' is very liberating but obviously not quite as liberating as, say, eight million to fall back on.