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.