Storage, Baggage, and Minimalism

I awoke just a bit ago feeling very chilly and I hate the cold.  It's still dark out and the temperature is hovering at freezing.  I'm living in a rolling home, a 22ft motorhome, and I lazily parked for the night without propane or water.  So there's no water for tea and even if there was, there's no propane with which to heat the water for tea.  So I guess I'll shiver in silence.  You would think that after going on two years of this kind of lifestyle I wouldn't let myself get into this kind of predicament but then you would be underestimating my laziness.  ;-)

If it's too cold to sleep and definitely too cold to get out of bed what else does one do but surf Facebook?    Come on, you know you do it!  So, when I looked at Facebook it threw up my most "liked" picture of 2017.

Now as anyone who knows me can tell you, I take a lot of pics!  I really expected a pic of some beautiful vista, flower, or bike trail - one of my usual pics that is.  Instead I was confronted with the picture above of an empty 10ft X 10ft storage unit I had just managed to gut.  I guess my embrace of minimalism attracted admirers or perhaps voyeurs who wished to accomplish something similar in their lives.  The caption of the pic is as follows:

For the first time in my adult life I no longer have a leased storage unit. Now it's true that I still have some work to do on my embrace of minimalism but it's all under one roof now and able to be better sorted, re-homed, dumped, or made into a burnt offering. Making progress...

It was true. I had storage all of my adult life up to that point and had probably spent, all said and done, around $40,000+ on storage over the years.  And for what?  To shuffle things from one pile to another because I was hanging on to things that no longer fit in my day to day life.  Oh to be sure, there were valuable piles, some valuable in sentimental attachment, others valuable in monetary attachment but the operative word there is attachment.

Whatever my reason, it was an unhealthy attachment to things that no longer fit into my life for one reason or another.  I had moved on but instead of letting those things go, I dragged them along with me.

I originally simply wanted to do away with the expense of warehousing all of this stuff I had managed to accumulate over the years.  It was pretty simple really, I didn't want the expense of caring for this added baggage any longer.  Little did I know that this purge would soon spill over into other areas of my life as well, such as my relationships with people, personal, professional, and spiritual but that's a story for another time.  My brain is too cold at the moment to even explore and or unpack the topic.

These are the things I was thinking in the wee hours of the morning as I snuggled under my blankets trying to keep warm in the frosty darkness just before twilight.  Living a life of minimalism in a rolling home is great for introspection and that's good because that's all I can do right now.  It's too cold to stick my nose out from under the covers!