Fast And Loose

I tend to draw a lot of possessions into my orbit, and this happens in two ways. One is that I acquire things at a high rate and cannot bear to get rid out them outside of when I am moving. By chance this has happened three times in as many months recently, but I don't plan on another time for a while. The other possession glut is that I have a hard time going out and about with few items on my person. I may not be alone on that any more than I am the other thing, but not having a car means that I can't just have a bunch of things in the trunk at any given time. There is no trunk, so things have to go in a backpack or some such thing.

That makes transit somewhat awkward and somewhat difficult. The choices are that or being absolutely sure of what I need and ruthless in standing by my decision to leave behind the rest, In the past I have always made the first choice and addressed remarks on the subject from friends by saying, "You never know what you might need". In truth the number of times I have needed things from my bag without having been able to predict it is few. Sometimes I need things I felt I would need. I feel like a fool every time I get it wrong like that.

I am now trying to go the other way, and strip away all the carrying-around items that have proved needless. It's like being a kind of human shark rather than a lumbering manatee. Free of encumbrances, I glide around gracefully while leaving people awed by my smoothness in my wake. As it was, I was like the Hunchback: Slow-moving, clumsy and evocative of nothing beautiful. Was I in any sense enhanced by the possession of things like Ibuprofen and writing materials? It may be so that I was a bit, but hardly enough to justify the clear downside.

There's no doubt that I will get it wrong by subtracting things that wind up proving necessary, but I feel sure that it will happen fewer times than before, and that on average I benefit more from traveling light than I ever suffer from being unprepared. Maybe this isn't what I was taught in the Boy Scouts, but it's just possible that there are limits to how much of life can be lived as well as possible solely by obeying their precepts. That's not a sure thing, but I'm prepared to lay life and limb on the line finding out for the good of humanity. I'll let you know if anything notable is discovered.