Escaping Stuff

 

Nothing but a tee shirt and a water bottle

When I look around the garage, all I see is all our stuff.  Bikes and skis.   Motorcycles and weed-whackers.  Basketballs and helmets.  Umbrellas and chairs   Chainsaws and cushions.  It all requires maintenance and interferes with our desire to just live simply.

  We put the hoses up in the attic and took the shovels down yesterday.  Who needs four shovels and five hoses.  Our attics and crawl spaces are full of stuff.   Half of our house is a storage shelter, and we are not hoarders.  We are minimalists.  It just creeps up on you.  One thing at a time until you are buried in stuff. 

We can’t move into our small empty dream cabin in the woods because it would take days to purge, merge and move.  Its like boiling frogs.  Ya don’t know what you've got till you're gone.   Eventually all purchases disappoint, and all possessions possess the possessor. 

I always thought that it would be great to have a mountain home, a beach bungalow, a desert casita and a city apartment.  But I have friends with multiple houses and all they do is drive around and fix stuff.  I ask them if they want to go for a ski or a ride and they say they have to clean or fix something or work with a contractor.  They love that kind of stuff, are great at it and make a lot of money doing it, but enough is enough.  

We drive by or read about these massive second in our neighborhood and wonder aloud, ‘what do you do with all that space’ and my wife always says, ‘vacuum’, and I think, ‘fix stuff or worry about all the contractors that are ripping you off’.  It does not seem really worth it all.  I see garage sales as a feeble attempt at liberation.  Who wants to leave all this crap to their kids or spouse.  It is a race to the grave because no one wants to clean this mess up themselves.  Somebody has to save us from ourselves.  Set me free.   Take my stuff - please.  

So we go away occasionally to get physically removed from our stuff, our baggage; physical, mental, emotional and social, our responsibilities and obligations, career connections and interpersonal commitments.  We pack our camper van (of course) with all the stuff we can fit, bikes and motorcycles, paddleboards and golf clubs, wetsuits and boogie boards.  Even when we travel, camp, run rivers and even backpack we bring our stuff.  But we leave the mountains and head for the coast.  Another recreational geography of dynamic hope. 

Happy Place!

To the Central Coast of California to escape the hustle-bustle and the Hurley-Burley of home.  To beat the crowds and skirt the traffic.  I’d tell you the name of the town but then I would have to kill you.  A sleepy little ghost surf town that has no extra water or land and doesn’t want to grow.  Sustainable and sensible.  

It’s a long way from everywhere, which is its charm, and foggy in the summer, which is its salvation.  Any place destined to maintain its good vibe is hard to get to and has a fatal flaw, to go along with the perfect snow, sand or surf. 

We found our hidden place with its unique attractions and fatal flaws, where we can go to escape our avarice and greed, to quell or quench our own intelligence and ambition.  A place where we can be mindful and live in the moment, be where we are, be who we are.  We are constantly surprised with what we find there.  We go to our special, happy place to chill and escape our stuff and ourselves but wherever we go, there we are.  And so is our stuff.

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