These days, with a baby in tow, I can’t even get on the subway without a Sherpa load of equipment. A few years later, I did the same on a three-week trip to Europe, which led to some suspicious questions from customs on the way home-apparently a single male going from Ireland to Italy to London with an Eagle Creek backpack and a shoulder bag has to be up to no good. A few days after I quit my job in New York to pursue my dream of becoming a writer, I was on a plane to India with nothing but a daypack, which was enough to see me through three weeks of train and bus travel from Mumbai to Karnataka to Goa. I’ve always been a homebody at heart, but I did a fair amount of traveling in my twenties, and I took a lot of pride in packing light.
Like most people, I use travel as an excuse to temporarily pretend that I’m the person I’d like to be all the time. White, who pointed out that a life like Thoreau’s is much easier when you’re “male, unmarried, and well-connected.”)
(Reading many of the posts there, I’m reminded of the good sense of E.B. I feel a similar sort of longing whenever I see pictures of someone’s tiny house, or when I browse the photo galleries at the Minimalism forum on Reddit, in which the striving to reduce one’s life to its bare essence-which often seems to consist of a bike, a laptop, and a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-turns into a perverse kind of competition to show off the least number of belongings. In such a place there is no need to keep the commandments, for there is no temptation to break them. Hino that was ten feet by ten, with no furniture except a small shrine, a desk, a bed of straw, some musical instruments, and a few volumes of poetry and music. Thoreau’s example is the most famous, of course, but I also find myself thinking of the poet Chomei, who at the age of sixty built a house on Mt. The house where I live is comfortable but modest, and I don’t feel as if my possessions are taking over my life, but I often wonder if I could take it even further. Every few months, I’ll get the urge to radically simplify.
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