Cargo

I was thinking about our Klamotten, the German word for gear, things. Our stuff arrived today. It was 31 boxes of essentials, things that we could not do a year without. Oddly enough we've been doing fine with the small set of things we were able to carry in our suitcases. Of course, our apartment is furnished so there was nothing like bed or chairs of knives or desks that we needed, but even so, we thought there were really essentials that we could not do without-piles of clothes, gobs of creams and things, books many and varied. All essential. Yet when it arrived all of it seemed unnecessary. Why did we bring all this I kept wondering? From the other side of our adventure everything we packed was unquestionably essential. It had been pared down from the mountain of things we owned to the tiny subset of goods that we simply could not do without. When we looked at the pile of things we were allowed to bring, we wondered how we would get by without so many of our belongings. However, 0n this side of the adventure we've needed very little of it. Lori is glad to have more towels so maybe she doesn't have to wash as often. We brought lots of food along to save money. I bought three boxes of books that I couldn't imagine life without. But now? I don't know why I brought so many books. I don't know why I thought I needed so many clothes (although my workmates must have wondered that I only ever wore two pairs of pants and three shirts and one tie during the week). But really, we were doing fine. We could have made it the whole year living like this. I think it was actually nice to unclutter our life for a bit. To have just a few essential clothes, books and things was actually refreshing. When I have my shelves of books around me at home, I am constantly reminded of how much I haven't read, so here I grew fond of having only a couple of books, the one I was reading and one to anticipate when I was finished with it. Now with the arrival of our boxes, I've got more books on my shelf than I can possibly read in a year. It was also kind of nice not having to pick what I was going to wear that day. I wore the thing that was washed. It was that simple. I was just sitting on the couch thinking, 'I've got to look through all the clothes that arrived so that I can figure out what I'm going to wear tomorrow. No wonder we live such stressed lives, we wallow in so much abundance that we are constantly having to make choices about which things from that abundance we are actually going to engage with on a day to day basis. I'm reminded of biologist Jared Diamond's book, Guns, steel, and germs in which he explores why western culture was so materially successful. The book begins with a local person living in New Guinea asking him, "Why do you people [meaning western people] have so much cargo?" Cargo is a good word for it. Why do we have so much cargo? Why does it all feel so necessary and essential? When we were packing, why did we feel like we were leaving so much when in reality we had way more than we needed? Nathan said it best, "All we really needed was the Xbox."





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