You know how sometimes there’s a movie or a scene from a movie that just sticks with you? Here’s one that sticks with me: In the Fisher King, Robin Williams plays a down-and-out dude living on the street. Toward the end of the movie, there’s a scene where someone says that they feel sorry for him because he has so little, but he says – on the contrary – he has so much. He pulls out 5 stones that he keeps in his pocket and relates the memories that are connected to each one. The crux is that he has everything, and all he needs, by holding these memories in his heart.
It wasn’t about stuff. It was about the memories, the relationships, and the things – that weren’t things – that he held dear.
Recently we were in Europe and I was struck by how many people we say pulling their luggage around. It was so fascinating to me that I began taking pics of each luggage-toting person. Those with red bags, matching bags, unmatched bags, sitting with bags, walking with bags, carrying bags, pulling bags…you get the idea. We’re like turtles carrying our stuff on our backs. We have stuff, we value stuff, we store stuff, we carry stuff. We don’t have shells to carry our stuff around so Pullman bags suffice.
We can be at home anywhere if we bring our stuff along. We travel. We seek new experiences, but we need a few things to take a long and create home wherever we are: the importance of a toothbrush, clean underwear, and sensible shoes for all the walking you’ll do on cobblestone streets of Europe.
Pack light though. The simplicity movement reminds us that to keep our hearts light, we should have more relationships and less stuff. We should invest more in experiences and people, and less in things.
When we toured Pompei (more on Pompei in another post), the guide pointed out how small the rooms were in comparison to our present-day houses. Why? Because they had less stuff back then. We could take a lesson from this, surely. When you buy something new, I’ve heard, divest of something else that you no longer need.
Keep only those things that bring you joy – and mostly those won’t be things anyway. We carry our things through life – both literally and figuratively – but since baggage is heavy, we are wise to be selective about how much we carry and pack light for the journey. Perhaps all we really need is just a few stones.
