I originally wrote a skeleton of this post on my personal journal folder as a reminder to myself, on how our lifestyle has changed significantly. That was back in 2018. I recently chanced upon the post and realized how these learnings have helped me even more as we live in what might become one of the defining times of our generation! You can trust me to be that grandmother, grand aunt who is going to bombard the next generation with COVID19 stories 🙂
Growing up, America was the land of dreams for a lot of Asian / Indian kids. I for one, never aspired to live in America, but from the loads of goodies that relatives bought back in their tightly packed suitcases, it was pretty evident that there was nothing that you can’t get here! Five years ago, when I boarded the flight to the US, I think the exciting aspect for me was imagining all the “things I could buy” (apart from getting to move in with V of course :)) However, life as usual, had its surprises in store.
The first time my consumption driven lifestyle hit me, was during our third wedding anniversary trip to Alaska. A land with a beauty like nothing we had experienced before. Throughout the whole trip, two thoughts kept going back and forth in our heads and was part of most of our discussion then. Can there be something more beautiful? But will this all even exist for another century? Will our race even remotely understand how our lifestyles have triggered the beginning of our own end. On another note, I have to really write a separate post about Alaska. Hopefully I get to that one too.
In a way Alaska changed my husband and me. No, we did not come back and turn into minimalists the next day. (Though I did listen to The Minimalists podcast fervently after that!) V and I however, started looking at our own lifestyles a little more seriously. I even more so, because I am guilty of being that pampered, spoiled kid who had more of everything than needed. My really good friend has this running joke every time we all meet – while they all took a public transport or biked to school, I went in a car to a school that was a 10 mins walk away and now I pride myself for running 10k’s!
Looking a bit more closely at our lives helped identify things that we can significantly cut down on. V’s job demands that he live out of a suitcase and I was a zero planner, which meant our lives had a LOT of convenience-based hacks in it (read single use plastic and lots of food wastage). With a little planning, quite a bit of research and some adjustments, we have managed to ride that wave. But the biggest lesson we both took back from the trip was how much we needed vs wanted something and that changed the way we shopped, consumed or went on with our lives. Doing this for about 2 years now, I can say, there is a sense of contentment and peace that I have never had before. Less is truly more!
Now as we live in COVID times, these conversations and thoughts become even more important. None of us know if the world that we will go back to – when those doors open up again – will ever look the same? However, I know that personally for me, my next curve of change is here. 2018 and 2019 in many ways prepared me for this and prevented me from falling off a cliff. Do I miss my constant eating out in restaurants over the weekend, my multiple travel sojourns in a year, my constant need to step out because I just can’t stay put? Oh YES! But did I really need so much of all of this. Not really sure. There has not been any sort of spiritual awakening in me – if I am sounding that preachy – but that little mindfulness that I was hoping to cultivate by meditating, traveling, reading, by going to my favorite yoga studio and in many more other ways, happened right here, inside the 4 walls of my apartment.
When the doors open again, am I going to just be a social recluse and give up on friends, socializing and everything around me? Not really, trust me, my bucket list sheet on my Google Drive is always active :D, so is my WhatsApp. However, I have taken one tiny step in realizing the value I attached to them, the timelines I created are meaningless!