Everything is Within Reach
This post was originally written for and published on the Hip Mountain Mama Blog last week. Thank you to Hip Mountain Mama for featuring me as a guest writer and helping spread the word about Turning the Wheel.
When I was 21 years old and able to live carefree, I rented a house with a few guys in Silverthorne, CO. It was a nice house at the back of a subdivision which backed up to open space. He had three bedrooms, a loft, and a hot tub. What else could we possibly need?
To keep the rent affordable we had up to 7 people living in the house at one time. To make room for everyone, I chose to live in the closet. I moved all of my possessions into a walk-in closet. I put a twin sized mattress on the ground and hung all of my clothes up around me. The couple of boxes of miscellaneous possessions I did own fit on the shelves above the hangers.
I remember waking up one morning and laying in my closet. I just laid there thinking about my life and what was going on. I wasn’t down about living in a closet. In fact, I was very excited about it. This was all I needed or wanted. Everything that I needed in this world fit into this one closet. I thought about all the poor souls who get attached to possessions. These people have 4 bedroom houses with basements and 3 car garages packed full of stuff that they ‘need’. Some of these same people pay monthly rent for a storage unit to store even more stuff. But I had simplified to where everything I needed was within reach, literally.
Living in a closet sounds really funny and impossible to most people, but I loved it. I worked about 4 hours a day as a maintenance man but got paid a 40 hour per week salary while I snowboarded almost every day and went out and saw live music nearly every night. I was living every day to its fullest. I had no stress.
Somehow over the next ten years I would end up with enough stuff to fill a large home including the basement and garage. Does this stuff make me feel any better? No, but I sure do have a lot more stress in my life.
Looking back, the year living in a closet was one of the best years of my life. Some would say I had nothing, but I would say I had it all.
This reminds me of my husband when he was 21. He hitchhiked the Coromandel Penninsula in N.Z. and slept in caves, found isolated beaches and even wrote and recorded songs about it. That was 21 yrs ago and we have 4 children now. He still loves his music and I do too. Being who you really are is so important. Happy to read that you are doing what you really feel you need to and looking forward to hearing more of your journey.
[...] coming out of our ears compared to what we had been used to. 4 or 5 years earlier I was happy living in a closet of a home. I had even spent two summers living homeless in the woods. But now we had the ability [...]