I just finished reading THE BIG TINY, by Dee Williams, the story of a woman who built herself a house that's smaller than a typical parking space.
I
have been sloooowly downsizing (by reducing my possessions, not my
living space), but sometimes I fantasize about going even more
drastically into simplicity. Interestingly, Williams's chief joy in her
tiny-house experience would not be mine. She revels in the physical
experience of building the house herself. I admire that capability, but
to me the building part would be a chore, not fun.
For most of
the book, her tiny house is settled behind her friends' larger houses,
and she helps them with chores while they let her use their indoor
plumbing and internet connection. Therefore, the tiny house is not a
hermit's refuge. Instead, it facilitates community, a little
neighborhood where the inhabitants of the three houses are in and out of
one another's space all day long. It reminds me of stories from
mid-20th-Century urban environments, where a couple might live in one
apartment with their grown children downstairs, their siblings in the
next building, their parents across the street, etc.
Student debt
is increasing, the job market has been shrinking, and wages are
stagnating. With the empty nest therefore growing less common, perhaps
the extended-family living situation will make a comeback, with "family"
sometimes including friends.
I'm hearing more and more about tiny houses lately--an interesting follow-up to the McMansion era. What's next?
I'm a planner, a scheduler, a listmaker. I like to know what I'm going to be doing and when. I rarely like to just wing it.
(Which
makes it all the more interesting that when I write fiction, I don't
really outline, but write my first draft by rambling, wandering impulse.
Curious.)
However, on my recent trip to Hawaii, we didn't have
every day planned out. We knew a few things that we wanted to do, and we
had certain flights to make, but other than that we were free to make
up an itinerary as we went along.
And we kept having to change
direction. It was too hot to do a hike we'd planned; some trails were
closed; one trailhead parking lot was too full; a restaurant wanted us
to wait too long for a table; we didn't know how we'd react to the
altitude of Haleakala; we didn't know what we would find at the end of a
certain road; we weren't sure we could find the trail we were trying to
find; we didn't know if the tide would be high or low when we got to a
certain beach.
We kept having to adjust on the fly, which is
ordinarily something I hate, but this time it was all right. This time I
even enjoyed it. I had coconut pie on impulse, at the moment when I saw
one in a display case that looked good, and it was just what I wanted.
We sought out a green sand beach on impulse. We had a beautiful desert
walk that wasn't even on our radar the day before. We found little
beaches and gardens hidden away from crowds, giving us the sense that
these places might have materialized just for us.
Once when we
were wandering the streets of Honolulu in search of a good place to have
brunch (and despairing a little that there seemed to be so many more
places to shop than to eat), I decided to sit down on a bench or a
planter or something because I was tired. I was tired at the moment, so I
sat at the moment. And then I looked up, and right in front of me was a
whole rack of free magazines listing places to eat in Honolulu. We
grabbed one, looked up a place, and found a great restaurant where we
ended up eating twice.
The reason I'm a planner is that I often
find the searching and flailing that goes with spontaneity to be
annoying, a waste of time, an energy suck. But this whole trip was a
case of accepting and living with what presented itself whenever our
preconceived ideas didn't work out. It was a case of enjoying what was
in front of us at the moment. We changed our flight from Oahu to Maui at
the last minute because we got to the airport early and thought hey,
why not try to hop on the earlier flight as stand-bys? And we caught a
beautiful sunset because of it. We showed up at the Hilo airport and
there was live music playing in the lobby. We ran into a park volunteer
who told us how to find a certain place we'd been looking for. We
wandered into a park ranger talk and ended up hearing a nose-flute solo.
Taking
what comes was such a persistent theme on this trip that I began to
suspect it might be a Life Lesson for me. Goodness knows I have been
needing such a lesson when it comes to writing, because none of my
writing plans in the past year have panned out. I have started asking
myself: What happens if I work with what's in front of me, instead of
what I wish I had, or what I thought I should have by now?
I've been trying to carry some of my vacation mindset over into my regular life.
When
going slowly, paying attention, giving people time, and prioritizing
quality over quantity, I find that I have to give up the ticking clock,
the compulsion to check everything off a list, the race to "keep up."
Some things really can wait.
I can't do all the things all the time, nor do I have to. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
I have just returned from two weeks away from the electronic life. I
watched a few TV weather reports and checked my phone messages once a
day, but other than that, I didn't touch a digital device and didn't
miss them at all. I kept a travel diary which I wrote longhand; I read
paper books.
This is something of a first for me. While I do
enjoy interacting with people online, and missed those personal
connections, I really didn't miss the total internet experience the way I
have during previous offline vacations.
So I'm thinking about
that, and what it means for me, and how and where I want to spend my
time going forward. Unplugging has always been valuable for me, and this
time, I suspect, even more so.
In the meantime, it's good to "see" you again. :-)
A few times a year, I like to unplug from the various online networks to
which I belong. I like the people with whom I interact online, and I do
miss my online communities when I step back. But there's something
refreshing about it, too, about taking time away from mouse and cursor
and screen.
It's that time again, so I'll see you later this
month. In the meantime, if you have major news, please leave it in the
comments, since I probably won't be able to catch up with the posts I'll
miss!
One of the hardest things for me to believe is that endings are followed
by new beginnings. All my life, I have been an opponent of change, a
nostalgic, a person who clings to things. I never assume that newer will
be better.
There is some basis for this, of course. Plenty of
change in this world is for the worse, and much of it seems to be
pointless: change for the sake of change. But there are changes for the
better. And some of the things I value most in my life right now are
things I would not have if I had not let go (sometimes voluntarily,
sometimes not) of what I used to have.
Over time, I've
become a little more accepting of change. I've gotten a lot more willing
to part with material objects, and have been doing an ongoing
downsizing/decluttering project at home. But I still have a hard time
trusting that a situation that has stopped working for me can be
replaced by something better.
In hindsight, it's easy to see the
turns I should have taken sooner, or with less trepidation. But when the
turn is in front of you and you can't see around the bend, it's
impossible to know whether a dead end or a beautiful new scene lies
ahead.
Eventually, the choice is whether to sit staring at the
washed-out bridge on the old route, or whether to try a new road. I keep
reminding myself there are new roads, for all that I get focused on the most familiar one.
