Getting ready to completely shut down your life so you can embark on an adventure takes a good amount of thought, planning, and work.
What is important? What’s worth keeping? What can we let go?
If you had asked me a year ago what I would have to keep from our house, the list would have been really long and included furniture, dishes, a LOT of kitchen stuff, clothing, trinkets and things we’ve picked up along the way, sports equipment, art, crafting materials, tools…I could go on and on.
Now our list is much shorter. I think we’re finally starting to detox a bit from the “acquire stuff at all costs” mentality and shift the focus to what is truly meaningful to us and worth keeping for that reason…and that is a much shorter list: photographs, art, some special pieces of furniture that Kyle built for us, dishes that a local potter made just for us, and some clothing. Everything else can go.
But that doesn’t make letting go any easier. It is still difficult to let go of things, especially stuff we’ve acquired together. So many of our things have fun memories associated with them….”we bought that when….” “we were doing this when we received that”. It’s hard to focus on keeping the memories and letting go of the things, especially when emotions come into play.
But from a practical standpoint, we can’t keep everything. Sure, we could load it all up in boxes and pay for a storage unit…but why? We don’t even really know when we’ll be back, so we could go on paying for that unit forever. And I’d be willing to bet that when we did come back and started going through boxes there would be plenty we’d laugh at ourselves for keeping.
I think we’ve always put a higher premium on experiences than we have on things and this trip is highlighting the importance of giving up stuff in exchange for having the flexibility to do what we want. And what we really want is to travel for as long as we can.
Long term travel is our future and we will do whatever we can to make that happen. A big part of that future involves having less and part of making that happen is that we need to let go of our stuff. It’s a deal worth making and we’re willing to do it. And so the purge continues.
What could you not give up from your home?
This is something I have learned from Sandra and am currently getting rid of a lot of my stuff. I had hundreds of DVD movies and now have them all backed up and sold. I had tons of clothes that I have started to part with. It is so liberating to not be so stuff oriented. I still have that in me but this is a great exercise that everyone could go through. I usually pose the question of, “When the zombie war hits, what are you taking with you?”