The Things We Carry

You can learn a lot about a person from the things they carry.  The things we carry tell the world who we are.  Or who we want the world to believe we are.  The things we leave behind can speak loudly too.  Our stuff has a lot to say.

Here is some of the stuff I brought with me on this grand adventure.  I don't really know why.  I guess they are my good luck charms.  Talismans.  For some reason they needed to be in my backpack.  I couldn't leave them behind.

There is the Christmas ornament my sister made that just happens to have my middle name on it.  There is the small painted stone with the heart on it from my husband.  It too says 'joy' on the back.  Joy is important to bring along.  There is the fortune from a long ago restaurant that says 'Thou hast seen nothing yet'.  And a camper key ring that one of the kids gave us with the words 'See the world' on the back.  And there is the Shayna bracelet.  Because I wanted her to be with us.

But that is not all we brought.

We may have miscalculated.

We don't even have a tent, or sleeping bags yet.  Or any of the other things people need for camping on the side of the road, or in national parks.  But don't worry.  Gary is on it.  He has already been observed sitting there with that faraway look on his face, thinking about how to rearrange everything into smaller bags so it will all fit in the trunk.  And if it doesn't?  An adventure vehicle that actually looks like an adventure vehicle may be in our future.

And if that pile in our car looks big you should see what we left behind on Kauai in a 10 x 15 storage unit.

Starting the puzzle.

Halfway there.

See that door handle up there in the left corner.  Filled to the very edge.

A lifetime of accumulated possessions.  No one believed it would all fit.  Even we had our doubts.  It was like a giant puzzle.  In the end we used nearly every square inch of that storage unit, floor to ceiling, and as far up to the front as it was possible to go and still allow room for that door to roll down.  It is quite a collection.  We have been good consumers.  Just like everyone else we have gathered a big shiny pile.

A lot of people's piles are even bigger and shinier than ours.  Whenever my sister would come to visit me on Kauai she would always tell me 'Lisa, you have no stuff'.  Which is clearly not true.  But I know what she means.  It is only my purging, decluttering, having a garage sale addiction, and my teeny tiny OCD issues that have managed to keep the level of accumulation pretty much under control over the years.  But in spite of my neuroses, we were still able to fill that storage unit with a giant mountain of stuff.  Stuff that we have to pay to store.  Stuff that we have to worry about getting moldy in the wet tropical air because there were no air-conditioned units available when we needed one.  Stuff that we have to ask our daughter to try and protect for us by changing the huge Damp Rid containers in there every few months.  And sometimes it makes me wonder.

I mean, I like my stuff.  I love how it helped create a comfortable and beautiful environment for my family to live in.  I love how almost everything in that storage unit I found to be either useful or beautiful.  I am not ready to give it all up just yet.  But over the last year I have given that pile basically no thought.  It has barely entered my mind.  All those things that I feel like I spent half my life cleaning and polishing and moving around has been absent from my brain.  I don't miss it.  And it makes me wonder.

It is so easy to let ourselves be defined by the work we do and the possessions that surround us.  By the things we carry.  One of the most important things for me about this time on the road is that it will give me the chance to see who exactly I am when I do not have all the trappings of my previous life around me.  Who I will be without my house and my furniture and my piano.  Who I will be without my endless time-consuming projects.  And you thought we were just going sight-seeing.  This is scarier than spiders any day.

We are carrying so many things with us.  And we have left even more behind.  We are homeless.  And sort of naked.  We have very little buffer left.  The world has become our home and somehow there has been a subtle shift inside me.  I felt it on the plane ride from Honolulu to San Jose.  I was in the bathroom and it was a mess.  Now usually I am a good citizen and clean up after myself.  But this time for some reason it felt different.  It felt like I was in the bathroom of my home and that I was responsible for it.  So I cleaned that bathroom with extra effort.  And I am wondering if that is how it is going to be while we are on the road.  That we are going to feel responsible for everything.  For the world.  And not just the things we carry.