My youngest is headed to Nebraska to go to college. My wife and I have had a dream about traveling for years. The intersection of these two events has allowed us to make the choice to follow a dream. Both of my sons will be over 16 hours away from home. Time for a change. That is why we chose to buy a camper and capture the moments and memories in our new blog Traveling RV Fools.
So here we go again.
We had a huge house in Colorado: three stories, five bedrooms and four full baths. The last year I never even went in the basement. Consumerism at its best. We sold a ton of stuff before we moved into a 1400 square foot house back in Clinton, Mississippi. We were still packed in like sardines. After two more garage sales over the last two years we actually fit pretty comfortably in our house now.
Now we are doing it again.
We are scaling back to a 180 square foot camper. I would love to tell you it is going to be easy. We went through about 30 boxes of files, books and keepsakes yesterday. We threw away five garbage bags of stuff. I found a file of keepsakes from my men’s ministry days while in the middle of this process. I read letter after letter from people who’s lives had been toughed by something I did or said. The tears rolling down my cheeks let me know I needed this downsizing exercise. It is helping me to realize what is really important to me, and it is not the accumulation of 34 years of crap. It is the people I love, the memories we share and being close to my boys.
Downsizing is both painful and rewarding. It is how you react that is really important. You have to have a new theme for your life, mine is Freedom.
Below is a book that helped me immensely with this process.