Mikes Thoughts

simplify the things

When I left America years ago I did have things. Many big and little things. In this small room I had a desktop computer running Linux. It did the whole web server thing, backed up files, shared things I wanted to share. Also did openvpn. There were other bigger things. I had a car then. A nice little Hyundai Elantra I had bought used. I had more clothes. Stuff I never wore stacking my closet. Somewhere there are old photos and files in a Rubbermaid container. Unless my ex wife decided to toss them. There are photos of my daughter before 11. My son at various times. All the things.

So what happens when I decided it was not things I was after? What do you do with things which still attach themselves to memories. I could not pack them when I left. Did not want some small storage thing for a single Rubbermaid container. I felt like I was cutting things. Replacing them with memories and moments and experiences. Those take less room you know. You can pack them up in small blips of light. So I did.

Sometimes I wonder if my ex wife kept that container. Other things of mine I was told second hand were tossed. I tossed things too. I shredded things and had someone come to the house where I stayed and picked up stuff.

It’s come to me more than a few times our incredible fixation on things. People that lean on things. To them minimizing is decluttering the things. It’s getting rid of stuff. Even digital stuff. We swear off certain things because we want less. What if though we reach a point where the true goal is nothing. Where life is not kept with a plethora of watches and gadgets and things. Things that often talk to other things.

So I left. All of those things left or done away with. That Rubbermaid container may not exist any more. That’s ok too. It’s not the container any more. It’s some abstraction of what may have been in it. That’s what I hold on to.

The rest I found no use for. What does a person need when they say goodbye to a life that seemed stunted by what I had. I realized flying to Japan years ago what I needed.

really nothing

And I had all of that. Changes of clothes. Changes of feeling. Change of mind.

Of course my daughter and son were left in some virtual container. Even that lately has been shredded. Somehow relationships there have seemed to pass through the filter. They have become almost this other life. Back when. Is that how it should be? Each one of us answers that in our own way. We are also blips of light and we flash across our universes. Sometimes daring to do what Thoreau said at Walden.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...

Source: Henry David Thoreau

We cannot really do that these days. Even in our disillusionment of life and what’s it’s become. I think people fear the known and unknown. They cannot just go because they will know no one and not be close to whatever things or people they hold dear. I feel this too. Like there is a lost piece of me holding that yesterday. Still trotting out small bits and bobs when things come along. I think we need that. We need the difference. It’s like running the “diff” command in Linux. Show me the before and after. Let me see both. I can judge for myself whether I pipe it to a file.

And so I found that and this. Things in some container never really gone. Left in some state in some state in some country left. I’ve felt all those things, those people, their conditions I left. But really there are these increasingly fragile ties. Little strands that keep us from now to then. We need them. Need to make the connections I believe.

Just don’t need to relive them. I can feel them back there. Fragile and sometimes obscured. Maybe it’s why I realized leaving that it was not things or money or how both come together in some strange dystopian state to become what life really means.

I don’t know. I just know and have known it’s less bit more. It’s that place to go we all have. That Walden in our woods.

Was remembering watching this guy traveling with his Thai wife around Thailand. His thing is living for the moment. Doing the dreams. Those are his dreams. His reality. His meaning of living in some moment. Not mine.

There’s no fighting any more about owning stuff to just have it. I left it. And it left me.

So I simplify the things. Even writing. It’s forever text in markdown with files I can touch. What is simpler. What things are left to account for. Only my writing in a journal. A blog. A life.

See you down my road. It’s not yours. Go find your own.