people and their bags

I have been on a few planes over the past week, and I am struck over and over by people’s relationships to their bags.

The fees imposed in the US for checked bags have clearly shifted people towards carrying on more, so people no longer just carry a bag to entertain themselves or work on the plane. They carry everything they possibly can. Shopping for bags shows this off even more: the 22 inch wheeled upright is touted all over as maximum legal carryon like it’s some kind of performance-enhancing drug. People can buy bags to put in their bags to help them pack more (this seems odd – surely the bag in the bag means you fit less, as you’ve got all that extra bag now?). The goal, I believe, is to carry as much with you as possible, which feels like a burden and as though you’ve gotten some special bargain by saving the $15 an airline would charge you. Travel by taking as much of home with you as possible.

So we jostle around on planes and airports feeling shackled to these bags. Don’t leave the bag. Find space for the bag. Get the bag. Stow the bag. Get the bag. Stow the bag. Don’t lose the bag. Don’t take your eyes off the bag. It makes our stuff so overwhelming.

You know what? I think $15 is a reasonable charge to not have to carry another one of those wheeled bags all over airports. I’ll give them another $5 to get it straight to whereever I’m staying.

Better yet, I’ll just take less. That’s what I’m doing this week: headed to Chicago till Friday with a lightweight duffel and a laptop bag. It’s no doubt still more stuff than I need, but I decided to err, for this work trip, on the side of having some dress shoes.

It’s a nice feeling, having a bag that just carries stuff (and which I can easily maneuver on the subway) and makes few demands on me.

a tiny efficiency

It is too easy, when making big change, to totally reject what you’ve built before. It is for me, at least. The astounding breadth of what I’m considering work-wise got me thinking that the work I built and the house I bought were all wrong. Too settled and unchallenging.

Yeah. Because owning a nearly 100 year old house and making art are totally boring and complacent.

I’m counteracting the “everything sucks” backlash of big change with small refinements. This weekend I spent $40 and redid my bed in a way that lets me keep the temperature no colder than 78F. I imagine that’ll save a little bit of power & money, and it came along with more color. And orange.

The household economies are going well without throwing life out of whack (I wrote a post on my FB-connected LJ about my kanban board as a means of life balance, too). My garden is feeding me quite well, though food is still a thing I spend more on than needed. Most everything else is down, spendy-wise. I feel safe.

we must destroy in order to rebuild

The past few days I’ve drifted away from my path here. I had a cheeseburger for dinner. I was in an accident over the weekend, and I haven’t eaten more than half of anything in front of me since Saturday night. Until the cheeseburger.

The whole accident thing left me with sensory overwhelm. Getting into the garden soothes that. So. I planted lavender, nasu, more tomatoes, squash, cucumber, rhubarb, and a ton of climbing flower seeds. And hung a bird feeder (which is doing wonders at keeping the birds from nomming my tasty plantlets).

I am sadly going to have to replace my car – though at least I contemplated life without one, it’s actually impossible to get to work from my house via public transit. Who builds an office complex completely off the transit grid? We do, apparently.

It’s a consolation, then, that if all these things grow I could skip buying any produce but berries this summer. It’s been so long since I ate a cherry tomato hot off a plant in my own yard.

I have some other livelihood stuff in mind to talk about, but first I need to hang with this whole post-accident feeling.

tuck your television into a cozy bed

I started to write “kill your television” but it bothered me. The wild uncomfortable coaching experience taught me that I don’t want to destroy anything violently. I want to poke it. [Dude. That is kindof literally true, beyond that little metaphor. I am a poker.]

This is all preamble to say: yesterday I unplugged the television! Today I planted peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, spinach. And, not because I want to eat it but because it’s in that Ed’s Redeeming Qualities song: swiss chard. I’ll figure out ways to eat it later.

things i can live without

I told a few of my fellow coaches at training this past weekend about my dream of this different life. It felt like they wouldn’t disapprove. Beautiful thing about coaches: they want people to be happy and fulfilled. They’ll support any way you choose to do that.

In practice coaching, I committed to someone to write a list – two lists, actually – of things I can live without and things I can’t sacrifice.

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horse before cart

Today’s small victory is payday. I’m making a commitment to shop for non-grocery items only at the end of pay cycles rather than at the beginning.