SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Yesterday I wondered about the accumulation of stuff. In rich countries like the USA the flea market and yard sales all contribute to the accumulation of stuff. They are both the direct result of people having too much stuff, stuff that they are eager to get rid of. Thrift and consignment stores are a third way of getting rid of stuff. All of these ways of redistributing goods allow you or me to buy high quality things at one third the price or less, but only in rich countries. Poor countries wear stuff out. Kathe was an avid consignment store shopper as well. I now have closets full of her carefully chosen, beautiful, inexpensive clothes. Susie will take some of them because she and Kathe are the same size and because they have always shared the same taste. In fact, all of the hand printed and hand made clothes that I brought back to Kathe over the years from India were picked out in India by Susie. So she will be glad to take these clothes and wear them over the years, except that she doesn’t have any room in her tiny house. They will have to be stored at my house.
One of the main reasons that people have big houses is to have a place to put all of their stuff. Often families are only able to buy the huge house of their dreams just before their children are about to fly the coop, in the kids’ late high school years. And then for years the mother and father have this huge house that is visited by their children’s families, usually one at a time, for a week at most during the year. For the rest of the year these old people have a huge house filled with stuff.
Susie and Todd have a small house, about twenty feet by ten feet with a high ceiling and a loft that they climb a ladder to to sleep. Susie’s house if full of beautiful small things as well, but she can’t buy a book or chair or vase because she has no where to put it.
Because she has a tiny house she is not tempted to buy stuff. She certainly has no place to put Kathe’s clothes. She has no closets at all, no kitchen, no bathroom, no indoor shower, only gravity fed spring water, and a wood stove that provides heat. The outhouse is up the hill on a path strewn with discarded artificial flowers from the old graveyard up the hill, the shower is outdoors behind the house with a wall around it and hot water from a water heater next to the house.
But they have a large front porch onto which they expand in the summer surrounded by a huge garden and secluded from the rest of the world by 17 acres of forest with a huge grassy lawn.
The tiny house is all they have needed for twenty years, although now they are planning, and have been for ten years, to build a small house in another location with a kitchen, bathroom and closets, but still a small house but more comfortable for old age.
So Susie and Todd are a model for living in a small space simply, my house is not a good model although it is the smallest house on our street. I sleep in a cold bedroom and spend my day in the large living room, dining room. I have twice as much or more space than I need. And, the point that I was trying to get to, I have a lot of stuff that I now have to dispose of.
My way of downsizing is to go digital and the iPad that I wrote about yesterday is part of the way that I am doing it. I have boxes and boxes of books, thousands of books, that I am going to get rid of. I have at least a thousand beautiful photography books that I have to dispose of, I have a lot fo outmoded electronic stuff that I have to get rid of. All the books and photographs that I am going to keep and read or look at are on my iPad. All I need is the iPad, or rather two iPads, one to write on and one to look at books and photographs and concerts and movies and tv on, although I could get by on one. All I really need is a tiny house with ten feet square to live in, a counter to cook at with a tiny refrigerator, and a wide porch or deck with a long view so that I don’t feel hemmed in. And because everything I need fits into one carryon bag and into my electronic devices I can have my ten square feet and the long view in an Airbnb anywhere in the world and can change location monthly. That is the value in downsizing and going small. It worked in Greece, it worked in Germany. It can work anywhere.
So in a world that is shrinking and where there are too many people, this seems a reasonable direction to go in. But I am not doing this to save the world, I am doing it to save myself. Because living by myself in what has become a huge house is no longer so attractive. I have to free myself of the house and my possessions to save myself.
I am not the first one to think of this. Jesus didn’t own anything except the clothes on his back. There are no paintings of his house, he is never painted carrying a bag. Of course, if you are a Messiah other people with houses will take care of you. Jesus preached simplicity and giving everything away. Gandhi was a comparatively wealthy lawyer in South Africa when he saw that possessions and fear of losing them burdened him, so he got rid of everything including his wife’s jewelry. Of course, as the leader of the Indian independence movement other people took care of him and gave him a place to stay. I’ve visited the house at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad where he lived for years in one room with a spinning wheel on the porch where he sat all day. Buddha was a prince, living in a palace, when he gave up everything and wandered, owning nothing and letting others feed him, until he achieved enlightenment. There are hosts of saints, St. Francis among them and Mother Teresa, who lived a simple and very fulfilling life. Thoreau tried it for awhile at Walden Pond and wrote about it. So I am in good company. I don’t have to be a saint, I don’t even need to be good to do it. It just makes sense.
But part of what makes it possible is the technology I was so enthusiastic about yesterday. I am not giving up things, I am just digitizing them. I am not truely Gandhian at all. And the device that exemplifies this, that shows me, shows us, how far we can shrink our world is the very powerful, very tiny, computer we hold in our hands, my iPhone. Almost everything I need has been compressed into this tiny device. It is a miniature iPad and laptop and tv and book reader and a way to listen to music and a watch and a radio and newspaper and map and GPS guide and flashlight and facetime connector and, yes, also a phone, which is what we call it. It needs a tiny bit of power and does require wifi to be fully functional, which could be community not personal wifi, so that everyone has access. Jesus or Buddha or Gandhi or Thoreau or Mother Teresa could have carried this around in a pocket as they led their stripped down simplified lives.
It won’t cook, although it will tell you how to, and won’t give you a shower or wash your clothes or give you a place to sleep or provide transportation, but it will do everything else.
Somehow Susie and Todd’s house points to one way to live comfortably together in the world, but the iPhone points to another way through which everyone could live with abundance and not own much of anything.
So in a world running out of everything with resentment and fury running hot, the simple house and the simple digital life seem to offer, at least to me, maybe, a way to get along comfortably together.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 