ABOARD DELTA FLIGHT 2109 OVER NEBRASKA – Ha! I’ve always wanted to write a dateline like that.
Yes, I am actually aboard a Delta plane, taking advantage of their newly installed in-flight WiFi. To be honest, I have always viewed flights (especially my relatively frequent SFO-DTW and SFO-EWR jaunts) as a nice respite from the connected world. But this is actually pretty cool.
I am, however, suffering from bad battery planning so I will need to make this relatively brief. I’m in-flight because I went home to Michigan for a quick weekend and spent time with my parents and my brother and sister-in-law. Over three days we watched two Detroit sporting events, one screening of The Hangover (a fine Phil/Kevin/Becky tradition), took two walks at Metro Beach Metropark on the shore of Lake St. Clair with Mom, Dad, and Truman, consumed one giant oven-baked blueberry pancake at The Pantry, made one requisite stop at Tim Horton’s, and played precisely 346 games of Scrabble.
I also shared the details of my aforementioned goals with my parents and Kevin and Becky, so now they’re out. Well, almost 
. They will be coming soon, I promise.
I wanted to share some thoughts on simplicity in what I hope will be an appropriately brief post.
When I was younger, I used to plaster my bedroom walls and shelves with Stuff. Every open space needed to be occupied by one of my many prized possessions. What were these things? Well, nothing especially valuable – a number of books, knick-knacks that I collected from all over the place, tacky posters, awards that I had won. I never had a lot of expensive material things growing up so the things that I did have I was keen to show off. The rest of my parents’ house was (and still is) entirely clear of clutter – what I would describe as Spartan. I couldn’t stand it.
I can stand it now.
As I get older, I find myself becoming refreshingly less and less consumed with the accumulation of Stuff. Partly this has come from my reading of Dave Ramsey. Some of it has come from JD Roth at Get Rich Slowly (see: The Tyranny of Stuff). But mostly, it’s come from an honest evaluation of the things over the past 30 years that have always meant the most to me.
These meaningful “things” have never actually been things. They have always been people and experiences.
I have two large bookcases full of books whose spines I stare at day after day. I have probably read about 40 percent of them. Every time I have moved for the last three times (from New Jersey to Michigan, from Michigan to California, and then within the Bay Area), I have thrown away approximately half of what I own. I now lug around approximately 13 percent of the possessions I had five years ago and yet I still want to get rid of more.
There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of possessions. I’m an admitted gadget junkie and book lover and someday I would like to have a decent-sized personal library. But the pursuit of possessions for the past eight years since leaving college has left me personally feeling empty. I’ve sacrificed a lot of other experiences in order to spend hard-earned resources on items that I may use once or twice and that will then simply sit around my place as badly depreciating souvenirs. My new focus will be on experiences that will bring me fulfillment and have true meaning for me. This, in fact, is a crucial tenet behind one of my new goals.
So take a step back and look around your home, wherever that may be. There’s more to life than Stuff. Figure out what this is for you, and pursue it. You won’t regret it.
Photo by austinevan.
