The Excellent Adventure

One of my friends recently sent me this link to an SFGate piece, “Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards“. (Thanks, FR!). Go ahead and read it through, then come on back.

The house we lived in was ~1200 square feet, give or take. It’s considered to be small. Most of the homes in the old neighborhood have had multiple additions both up and out, to accommodate the need to give each family member their own isolated room, probably private TV, and don’t forget, locking door. One of the selling points, to us, of the place, was the wide-open floor plan, and the comparatively huge backyard, that hadn’t had the life crushed out of it by the need for one more little sheet rock box.

Right behind “are you nuts?” and “how did you talk your spouse into it?”, we get the question, “you’re all going to live…on a boat?”, delivered with a slightly incredulous tone, as if the idea of downsizing couldn’t possibly be right. No one in this day and age climbs down the ladder of progress…you all have to climb up up up up. Bigger, better, faster, more. "Keep climbing!" we’re all exhorted, and when you choose to question whether the wall the ladder of progress is against is one you really want to scale, you’re branded a heretic. The thought of three adults and two children on a boat sends people into claustrophobic fits. And of course now that I’m quite noticeably pregnant too, the idea of three kids is just unbelievable. (Of course, in our culture, three kids is considered a whole lot no matter what, so I’m taking that as a separate bundle of issues which I’ll probably tirade more about later.)

I can say to people, "Well, you know, our boat has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a galley, a salon, and a workshop", and that calms them down a bit. That’s something they can wrap their heads around. I’ve sorta learned not to address what I see as the fundamental problem here, which is… how much room away from your family do you really need? How many compartments for stowing away your stuff, and yourself, are really necessary?

“Our society’s been based on excess for so long, it’s still a somewhat novel idea to live simply,” says Jay Shafer.

We’re not even cruising yet, we’re still liveaboards, still adjusting to this new way of living. And even for people who, back in their terrestrial suburban life, quarterly went through their junk and offloaded, we’re still astonished at the stuff we have, the stuff we chose to move onto the boat, and the stuff that we now look at and ask each other "Remind me why I thought this was so important?" I laugh every time I pitch some object, knowing full well that this thing survived several rounds of whittling down before it even got schlepped here. But somehow now that we’re on the boat, and the point is to enable experience rather than acquisition, our perspective on both stuff and space has shifted radically.

Before we moved aboard, we looked at downsizing both our space requirements and our object dependencies as a fairly minor part of the adjustment, since we were already pretty simplicity-minded. I would never have known, before, how really huge it was, and how far we had to go, and how unpatriotic (according to our Chief Executive) that makes us.

But you know… it’s really, deeply liberating. And sometimes, liberty itself is lurking right behind that box of stuff you’ve been meaning to take to charity.

Tags: clutter, downsizing, family, footprint, liberty, liveaboard, progress, simplicity

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