Last night, I had a particularly vivid waking dream in which I was on a ferry with every single RVer I know both virtually and offline. We were on the passenger deck and our rigs were below. The ferry was sinking slowly. Our rigs were goners.<\/p>\n
I floated amongst the group listening to everyone’s reactions. Most of the part-timers were fairly nonchalant about the whole thing since they had insurance. The full-timers, one in particular, were hysterical that their entire lives were about to disappear into a watery abyss, yelling at the part-timers that they just didn’t understand what our rigs mean to us.<\/p>\n
It was fascinating.<\/p>\n
I stayed out of it until we were given permission to go down to our rigs one last time for about 10 minutes and take what we could carry only.<\/p>\n
I go through that exercise in my mind frequently and it was interesting to actually do it.<\/p>\n
I put together the cat carriers, wrangled the babies in them, and put the phone, iPad and iPod in my purse with their cables. I still had five minutes left, so I grabbed a backpack and put my computer, chargers, and hard drives in it, cushioned with some clothes. I made sure to switch to practical shoes, added a layer, wrapped a scarf around my neck, heaved the backpack on, put the purse strap around my shoulders,\u00a0 grabbed a carrier in each hand, and walked out of my beloved home forever.<\/p>\n
I awoke wondering yet again about how much ‘stuff’ I really need. Yes, five years later, I’m still Sorting It Out.<\/p>\n
Compared to a lot of people, I’m practically a minimalist (but I would never consider myself one!) and compared to others, I’m a hoarder. These comparisons are, of course, pointless, but do reveal that since I am still struggling with my possessions, my decluttering journey is not over.<\/p>\n
Right now, I have the perfect amount of stuff to fill this RV in such a way that all the storage space is utilized, but it is not all overflowing and everything is easily reached. I’m organized!<\/p>\n
I’ve reached the stage of decluttering where the exercise seems almost pointless. I use everything I own, I have space to store everything I own, I can easily access everything I own, and I know where everything I own is. Why do I still get the urge to keep downsizing?<\/p>\n
This answer is that the life I’m currently living won’t be my last. Even before I started RVing, I knew what the next stage would be, and that would be an extremely minimalist existence traveling around the world with just a bag. The idea of being free of the endless cycle of domesticity will be a reward after a long journey of mostly conventional living.<\/p>\n
Right now, my cats require me to have a stable home base. It makes sense that, in the twilight of their years, I continue to indulge my nesting instincts and get the idea of ‘home’ right for once so that I can move on and follow other dreams later. But I can’t lose sight of the vision I have for my post-RVing years.<\/p>\n
So I keep decluttering, simplifying, reducing. When the day comes that I find myself alone, I won’t need to waste time getting ready for the next phase of my life.<\/p>\n
But there’s no need to rush there. I’m enjoying this life, cluttered as is it, too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, I had a particularly vivid waking dream in which I was on a ferry with every single RVer I know both virtually and offline. We were on the passenger deck and our rigs were below. The ferry was sinking slowly. Our rigs were goners. I floated amongst the group listening to everyone’s reactions. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5,3],"tags":[1447],"class_list":["post-22461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-rving","category-travel","tag-cats-in-an-rv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}