Making Space

June 3, 2009

We continue to prepare for our journey. The truck has gotten 4 new tires, an oil change, a tune-up, and a check up. We find ourselves giving things away at a very fast clip. Oddly enough, even though we will be living out of our truck, we have a little more leeway in terms of taking things than we thought we would. When we thought we’d be heading for Ireland, we were planning on taking no more than 120 pounds of stuff, because we’d have to mail it and that’s expensive! For me, the toughest things to weed through are my books. Books are heavy! So I now get to bring more books than I thought I would. I have some tucked away among other things in the totes we will be bringing. I have a milk crate stuffed with books to read along the way. It’s always this way when I travel. First I decide which books and stitching projects to bring and then I pack clothes in the room I have left. It’s bad enough when I am going away for a few days or even a few weeks. I have never tried to work this out when I will be gone for a few months! I keep reminding myself that there will be places to get more reading material if it looks like I’m going to run out. And since I have long ago made peace with the fact that I will never get to read all of the things that interest me, I can be pretty certain of finding something in a reading emergency!
With the books and everything else, it has been fun to think about who might like the particular object I am giving away or what group could best use it. We brought a bunch of clothes to the Gospel Mission the other day so they could give them out to people who could use them. We have given away books to various individuals and to the local library. Some will become a part of the library collection and others will go to the Bookie Joint, a twice weekly used book sale with proceeds going to Friends of the Library. Freecycle is a great place to find new homes for things that we can’t take with us, but could be useful for someone else.
There is something completely freeing about this exercise. I am getting rid of most of what I have in order to move around freely. I find that I really do not have an attachment to most of this stuff anyway. The stuff that means something to me can come, but it is a valuable thing to discover how easily I can let go. I also am doing this in an environmentally friendly way as much as possible. We are not throwing things away, we are giving them to people who will have a use for them. As we proceed, I come to a deeper realization that this trip will lead to some fundamental growth and lead us into deeper insights into who we are and what we believe in.