Thursday, November 20, 2008

Minimalism is an art

When I came to Chile, last February, this is what I brought:


I was pretty happy about my packing. I take pride in traveling light. I'm quite capable of living with very little; in New Zealand I spent 6 months driving around the country with 2 pairs of pants, one shirt of each degree (long sleeved, short sleeved, etc), two pairs of long johns, a scarf, a hat, hiking gear, a sleeping bag, a continually interchanged book and some food.

That was a trip of constant movement, however. When you're in one place, it's pretty astonishing the ways that things creep in against your best intentions. Fact of the matter is, I'm a bit of a packrat underneath my minimalist intentions. It's a terrible crush of ideals: I believe in possessing little, but I refuse to waste perfectly good wrapping paper or twist ties or potentially-art-project-usable bus ticket stubs.

I discovered the depth of the situation this past week when my roommate and I switched bedrooms. Our apartment has one decent room and one amazing room, so we've decided on a 2 month rotation for the master bedroom. Now it's my turn, so I packed up my things and moved across the living room. To my astonishment, this is what I discovered:




I have got a lot of stuff.

Over the last few days, I've been organizing myself. Bits of paper flutter down from a stack of documents, asking me, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" and "What would you do if you could have any job you wanted?" "Tell your partner about your family!" an index card instructs me. "Dear Caroline," my handwriting floats across a page, "I've now been in Chile four months...."

I shuffle through a mountain of student worksheets, Spanish-language newspapers I never read, brochures that people stuffed into my hands as I walked down the street, flyers for events that looked interesting but then were forgotten about. Archaeological evidence that I have been living a life here. Debris from the daily back and forth that sometimes slips from the mind next to the enormous decisions that seem to litter the decade of one's twenties.

Holding on to these things is a way of grabbing at time. Renouncing belongings, throwing away brochures, accepting that the letter will never be sent, is accepting the passing of moments. In the end, I seem to be a time-grabber.

Nonetheless, Buddhist principles aside, I went out and bought myself a lovely particle board desk and bookshelf, complete with very small desk chair, and a full length mirror. I'm living here, it's time to accept that I need to make arrangements. So now I am happily writing to you from my newly established, thing-entrenched life. And I didn't throw away the wrapping paper.






3 comments:

Mamacita Chilena said...

Me too! I am always amazed by how much stuff I have managed to accumulate over the years. When I came here I sold everything I owned in the U.S. First Seba and I lived in a room together and we didn't need to buy anything to furnish it. Then we moved into our first small apartment and bought a bed and a couch. Now we're in a bigger apartment and all of a sudden I have a dining room table and it's like WOAH WOAH WOAH, why do I have all this STUFF?!?

Your room is really cute though! Nice bedroom, I can see why everybody would rather live in that one!

Anonymous said...

WOW amazing view out of your bedroom window. I also love the room.

I moved from Austria to the UK with 35 kilos of luggage. 6 years later I returned to Austria in an LCV which was almost full (scary) I had to sort everything out there (most of it is in the loft of my parents house) and arrived in Santiago about a month ago with 35 kilos again..

Meredith said...

Kyle and Andre--

Thanks, I love my room....although I'm worried I'll never go outside again now that I can sit here writing as if I'm in a treehouse...

It is amazing the way things add up. On every trip I've been on, in order to get home, I've had to abandon my socks. That's been my method. All those socks all over the world to make room for the wooden tulips from Holland, the miror from Greece, blah blah blah.... :) All of these lovely items are now being stored in the basement of my parents' house! Maybe I should have kept the socks?