A Place For Everything And Everything In Its Place

Eventually….. Right now you have to hurdle a dozen storage bins if you want to move from one side of the boat to the other.

Moving from one house to another is relatively simple. Take all your stuff pack it up and move it to the new place. Down sizing from a house to the boat has proven to be exponentially more difficult.

We have garage saled, (or whatever is the past tense for having sold at a garage sale) donated, sold off, given away to family and friends, virtually everything we had that we felt we would no longer need or would not fit on the boat. We are moving what’s left onto the boat.  Judging but what we see, we still have some purging to do.

Letting go of stuff has, in itself, been an interesting process. It’s funny what we come to hold dear and difficult to let go of and why, and at the same time, look at all the stuff we have accumulated, rationalized purchasing at the time, yet have rarely used since the purchase.

Why was I holding on to the Motocross motorcycle helmet? Was I really thinking I was getting another bike? We got a few bucks for a used folding card table and had to give away a complete dining room suite. Why does that bug me the way it does? We went through the CD collection and found albums still in the cellophane wrap, yet at the time had to have it. We have quite literally disposed of, in one form or another, thousands of dollars worth of goods that were accumulated with no need for them only the desire to have them.

Part of what we desire with this move is a somewhat simpler life style yet I can already see the influence of the past 55 years in how we think about what we require for the trip. The influence of the consumeristic North American lifestyle is going to be a tough habit to break. The good news is there is a lot less space on the boat than there was in the house.