I’ve got it all…

C.E. Grundler

The lovely house on a nice tree-lined street in a nice little town in the ‘burbs. A fifties ranch, four bedrooms, two baths, two car garage, pretty yard with flowering shrubs and a swimming pool size koi pond. The only thing missing is the picket fence. And I don’t want any of it. But explaining why I’ve begun paring down my life towards escaping this text-book American dream is something most people simply can’t understand.

To quote Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap!” It’s a life that requires us to be commuters and consumers, working to support an economy based around conspicuous consumption, that demands we continue to work longer and harder and continually acquire just to sustain a standard of living society and the media deem ideal. And it’s a lifestyle I never signed up for. But what’s that saying? Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. (I believe credits there go to John Lennon, who certainly had other plans. And there’s a lesson in that as well: life can be shorter than we expect, and far as I know, there isn’t a do-over button.)

I’d never planned to end up in that house in the ‘burbs – Plan A was to live on a boat – to live simply and to travel — but events set me on a different course. And the more time passes, the more I know this is not where I want to be and how I want to live. And the more I work towards Plan A, paring down my life to the essentials, the more I discover just how much that confuses most people. Could I seriously want to leave all ‘THIS’? Yes. More than they’d ever imagine.

Much of what has always appealed to me about the liveaboard life is the minimalism of it. You don’t fill a boat with stuff that doesn’t serve a specific purpose. You don’t acquire without putting great thought into what it is, what purpose it will serve or what value it would hold to you. There is limited space, which sets a limit to the possessions you keep aboard. It’s a lifestyle that favors the frugal, a lifestyle that requires less income to sustain, and therefore less work to maintain, which in turn leaves more time for actually living. True, there are many paths to living on a simpler, more sustainable and modest scale, but boats are what I know and where I want to be. I suppose for the general population it seems a radical, fringe sort of lifestyle, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or viable. Still, here in the land of ‘more’, I’ve discovered it’s hard to explain that I’d really be much happier if I owned far less. But fortunately, one of the first things I’ve let go of is caring what other people think.

So, for those of you who already made this shift, how did those around you react? What would you have done differently? What would you have done sooner, or not at all? Any regrets?

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