Life lesson #3837

Last week I spent 5 days and 4 nights fishing the U.S./Canada boundary waters out of Ely Minnesota with my good friend Tony, his son's Henry and George and nephew Mitchell (Mitch-Mitch you son of a gun!).
Aside from having a great time, I learned how liberating it is to not be bogged down with a lot of stuff and to have to get by on just the bare essentials.
On the long canoe trip out, one of several large packs of equipment was accidentally picked up by a group of folks at one of the 2 quarter mile portages on the way to our camp site. We didn't know it was missing until we had completed the nearly 5 hour canoe trip and were already setting up camp.
The missing pack contained all Tony's clothes and personal affects along with all my clothes. My personal affects (toiletries, flashlight, knife, hatchet etc.) were in a separate back pack, but Tony had literally lost everything.
Realizing it could take days to track down the pack and knowing we were totally worn out from the canoe trip, we decided to just make due.
So, over the course of the next 5 days, I wore the same pair of pants, the same shirt, same pair of socks and the same fleece pullover. Thanks to the generosity of young George, I had 1 additional pair of underwear to rotate through; washing and drying one pair each day while wearing the other.
As a result of that experience, I realized how nice it was each day to not have to make choices about what to wear when I woke up. I realized how much easier it was to have a very limited amount of things to keep track of. I realized how little a person actually needs to get by. And I realized how having a lot of things just seems to complicate living.
Not one time while we were out fishing the pristine boundary waters, did I think about my lost clothes (actually I did think about them one time when both pairs of underwear were wet at the same time). I didn't think about my clothes in the evening while we were sitting around the camp fire eating fresh caught Walleye and I didn't even think about my clothes each morning when we woke up at sun rise to start the day drinking camp fire coffee in the same clothes I was wearing the night before when we retired to our tents.
On that trip, I learned the power of simplicity. I learned how liberating it is to only have to manage 1 pair of sunglasses, or 1 pair of shoes. And I learned that having too much stuff is highly overrated. I'm going to try to not forget that.