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.

On the long canoe trip out to our camp site, one of our several large packs of equipment was accidentally left at one of the 2 quarter mile portages, and we didn't know it was missing until we'd completed the nearly 5 hour canoe trip and were setting up camp.
The missing pack contained all of 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 combined with the additional fact that we were totally worn out from the canoe trip, we decided to make due with what we had.
Over the course of the next 5 days, I wore the same pair of pants, same shirt, same pair of socks and the same fleece pullover. Thanks to the generosity of my young friend George, I had 1 additional pair of underwear to rotate through; washing and drying one pair each day while wearing the other.

As time passed, I slowly began realizing how nice it was to not have to make choices each morning about what to wear. I saw how less stressful it was to have a very limited quantity of things to keep track of, and by the end of the week, I came to see how little a person might need in order to get by. In short, I got a glimpse at the possibility that having too many possessions might actually complicate living-not make it simpler.

Not one time while we were fishing and camping in nearly complete solitude, did I think about my lost clothes (truthfully, 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 Walleye fried over an open fire, and I didn't think about my clothes in the morning when we woke up at sunrise to start the day drinking camp fire coffee.

On that trip, I learned the power of simplicity. I learned how liberating it is to only have to manage 1 pair of sunglasses, 1 pair of shoes, and 1 pair of pants. I learned that having too much stuff might in fact be overrated. I'm going to try not to forget that.