"I've made a terrible mistake." That was my first thought as the building manager opened the door of my new place, which I'd rented sight-unseen.
It was my third apartment in the five or six years since I'd gotten separated (after a surprise husbandly mid-life crisis) so it wasn't the shock of apartment living vs. a house -- although that had been an adjustment for a while. It was that this was it -- the final test, the boss battle, the ultimate last step in my now stubbornly-done-on-principle, Thoreauvian journey of simplifying my life -- a studio apartment.
I'd rented the place off a website description and some building manager snapshots from more than 500 miles away but, from all indications (and just possibly a fisheye lens that may have made it look a *little* bigger), it seemed fine -- especially considering that it was in idyllic Cape Cod, surrounded by trees and minutes from innumerable beaches. So, I took the plunge, packed my things, hired a mover, drove through a slew of states . . . and then, as I arrived and saw just how minuscule my new home was to be, was swamped by that heavy, sinking wave of regret.
But the panic soon passed. Once everything was in place, all was right with the world -- I felt completely at home and entirely happy and at peace. It demands very little time or care and is truly all that I need.
Now, obviously, when I was married and had kids living at home, I legitimately did need more room than I do as a single person on my own, but it was a jolt for me to be faced with my own sense of self-entitlement -- Me! Who'd always prided myself on being utterly non-materialistic! The shock of feeling that a small space was a huge mistake set me back on my heels a little and made me think. How ridiculously our expectations swell up as the years pass! Without ever really realizing it, we start accumulating more and more stuff, taking up -- and expecting -- more and more . . . and then even more, space in the world.
It struck me then that, had I been presented as a college student with this same space as a dorm room -- with my own kitchen, a spacious private bathroom, a big walk-in closet, and a main room big enough to comfortably act as living, dining, and bedroom, overlooking a beautiful garden courtyard, I would have felt like I'd won the lottery. I'd have been over the moon, and rightfully so. It hit me hard that my expectations had ballooned so drastically since then. I'm not all that much different than I was back in college, life experiences aside, when did I start thinking it was a given to keep having more, getting more, needing more than I did when I was young?
There's just this odd, unwritten--maybe never even consciously realized-- belief that as we go through life, it's just natural to just keep accreting more and more and more things, Katamari Damacy-like. (For those who don't have a computer game geek family, the premise of the game was a character who rolls around, growing constantly larger and larger, snowball-like, as he magnetically attracts more and more objects to himself -- until he's entirely consumed, invisible, inside a massive sphere of random . . . stuff. https://glitchwave.com/game/katamari-damacy/ )
The thing is, most of the time, we end up leaving all that for someone else to deal with when we die. About 10 years ago, my brothers and I were faced, during our grief, with a mountain of our parents' possessions and the painful task of disassembling their lives, piece by piece, deciding which bits to keep and which to let go of, forever, never knowing if they would have chosen differently.
Deciding to live simply means I've already done the paring-down, made the choices--and living tiny means there's no empty space in my home to tempt me to fill it with new possessions (Oh, OK, maybe just a few!) It brings me peace to know that my kids won't have a mountain to face when I go --a hillock, maybe, a gentle knoll. It's not a lot.
And it's really all I need.
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