Downsizing

Downsizing

Since we made the decision to wander away from the mundane for a year (going walkabout - as the aussies say) we have had to make some decisions about what we want to keep.  Since the goal of the journey is to gather experiences we need to get rid of a lot of the stuff we have collected over the years.  Stuff holds you down and holds you back.  Like the old man in "Up" - until he got rid of the old stuff he was unable to experience the world. 

Ok.   We are not getting rid of everything. We are also not leaving the world behind forever.   Just for a little while.  We want to come back.   So, we keep some stuff.  The Salvation Army has been a big beneficiary - maybe too much so: they are starting to know us by our first names down there.  


Who would have thought we had so much clothes!   I don't look good in clothes anyway, so why do I have so much to decorate myself?  Probably because, as bad as I look in clothes, I look so much worse without them. 
  
The more stuff we get rid of the better I feel.   I  am realizing that stuff owns you and not the other way around.  You think you are the proud owner of fine furniture but really the fine furniture owns you. 


 Kind of like a cat. 

Reality Sucks

Reality sucks.

Back when I was a child reality was very elastic.   It could be bent, shaped and molded to whatever you want.  Not that you did that deliberately.   It just happened.

I believed that the trees waving caused the wind.   If you came across a frog and he greeted you in perfect Canadian accented English it was because someone with a Canadian accent had taught him to speak.  We had already landed on the Moon, Mars and were contemplating travel to other stars in sophisticated star ships.  Santa Claus was real although the Tooth Fairy was a bit iffy and the Easter Bunny was definitely a myth.   After all, you shouldn’t have eggs delivered by a creature that hops. 

 All you needed to fly were some wings.  You could make these out of whatever material you had handy – cardboard for example.  Birds had wings and no propellers or jet engines and they could fly.   You needed engines because the engine themselves were so heavy they required engines to lift them.   Forget the engines and flight was inevitable.  If you crashed it would probably hurt and you would be as flat as a pancake on the ground but eventually you would regain your three dimensional shape and pull yourself off the ground with one hand, make some comical remark and carry on.

Aliens were probably here.   I just hadn’t met one yet.  Although I did suspect some of my friends and lots of my acquaintances might be aliens.

 Actually, I still believe that. 

On the darker side I believed that monsters existed and could be found in the dark corners of the closet, under the bed and in the basement.  They tended to follow you home in the dark and were merely waiting for the moment when you were careless or foolish. They could be shot, though.   I know that because I did shoot one of them with a gun that shot ping-pong balls. The monster turned out to be my Dad.  That did not mean that actual monsters could not be dealt with in a similar manner.

Time has passed since then and reality has hardened and set into the shape it is now.   I have to admit I preferred my earlier vision.

Santa Claus has left and took the aliens and monsters with him.  My attempts to fly using cardboard wings left me gasping on the ground in pain, completely three dimensional and in no mood to make comical remarks.   Frogs will never speak much less do a song and dance to old Al Jolson tunes.  The trees will not get together and decide it is time for a windy day.   There are a great many other parts of my reality that have, for some reason, been rescinded.  I miss them.

Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge.   That is a statement that I cling to with some desperation.  Living in one’s imagination, however, is fraught with perils.  Reality still exists and insists that one must feed and clothe the body, have social interactions and pay taxes.

So what do we do about that?

We (my wife and I) have decided to take a year off of reality and hit the open road.  We are not expecting to meet aliens, Santa Claus, or singing frogs but we are open to the experience.   We hope the planes we fly on have engines and monsters stay in the closets and under the bed.

The time has come to reclaim our sense of awe and youthful delight in what we experience.   (Although “youthful” might easily be interpreted as “childish”)

We will start in June by hopping on our bicycles and heading across the country.  Thereafter we will go where the wind, the mood and our dreams take us. 

In the words of Peter Pan:  The second star to the right and straight on until morning.