Now and Then It Keeps You Running

The change from living on the road to living in a house is more difficult than the reverse. Or perhaps more painful is the better way to put it. It was difficult to get rid of all of our stuff, surprisingly difficult, but buying new stuff is downright painful.

In order to avoid the financial pain, but also the more nebulous, soul-sucking pain of consumer culture that eats at us all, and since most stores were closed anyway, we ended up essentially camping in the house. This was not so much a conscious decision, as a thing that happened. Camping is what we know.

We did have a few items in a storage unit that we brought out here. Our storage unit provided an interesting lesson (again) in how bad I am at estimating what my future self will want. I saved all the wrong things (again). Five boxes of books? Could not get rid of those fast enough¹. But damn I wish I had kept more of my tools. I wish I had my saws, my benches, my shelves, my shovels and rakes. Tools. Always save tools.

Thankfully I did keep my desk. We also kept a dining table. No chairs though. No problem. We pulled up our camp chairs for the first couple weeks. Eventually we found some cheap chairs at a local antique store. To date, that and a bunk bed for the kids, are the only pieces of furniture we’ve purchased. The previous tenant left a bed frame, we bought a new mattress.

For the most part though, even months later, we are camping in a house.

We try to spend most of our time outdoors anyway. Early on in the spring this worked great, but as the summer wore on, without much water to swim in, the heat drove us in.

While we did buy some furniture, there were certain things we just did not want to spend money on. Like a washing machine. What an insanely boring thing to spend money on. No one needs a washing machine. What we all need are clean clothes.

I assumed Corrinne would not stand for this line of thinking, so I said we’d get a washing machine off Craigslist. To get us by until that happened, I bought a hand washing plunger and a couple of five gallon buckets. The house came with, as any house dating from the 19th century should, a clothes line.

If you’ve followed luxagraf for long you probably know where this story is headed. Yes, six month later, we’re still hand washing all our clothes. In a bucket, with a plunger. It sounds crazy, but the things is… we like it better. Our clothes get just as clean, very little money was spent, and, as a nice added bonus we get healthier because we’ve built a little exercise into our day. At this point, if I were going to buy anything, it’d be a clothes dryer.

I think this little fringe benefit, of exercise, is a bigger deal than it seems at first glance. Maybe it’s just me, but I really dislike “working out”. I don’t dislike the effort or process, actually, truth be told I love lifting weights, but the whole idea of “exercise” bothers me. That I should stop my life and go to a gym or go do something other than just daily living, feels fundamentally unnecessary to me. It feels like a symptom of much deeper problem. Why does my daily life not provide enough physical exertion to keep me healthy? Doesn’t that seem odd?

There are certain habits and customs of modern life that only seem sane because we’ve been so deeply indoctrinated into them. I believe this is one of those. The idea that you should stop your actual life and “exercise” says a lot about our lives. Life has become so physically easy for most of us these days that we become unhealthy living this way. If this is true, and most evidence suggests it is, I posit there is something seriously wrong with our lives, and the effects probably go far beyond needing to exercise.

I think this is a sign that life is not supposed to be physically easy, that there needs to be struggle and even suffering to be a fully realized, healthy human being, but never mind that right now. Let’s just say you hate the idea of working out, and want to build more exercise into your life: that’s quite simple.

The more time I spent thinking about this, and yes, I often think about it while plunging the day’s laundry, the more I thought hmm, what if I built more of these little workouts into my day? What if you used a hand crank blender instead of a Vitamix, what if you used a reel push mower instead of riding mower? What if you used a plunger and a bucket to do laundry? It’s really just extends a basic life philosophy I established years ago when I was living in New York: when there’s an option, take the stairs. Walk slowly if you want, but take the long way.

And I have good news: you can do this too if you want. It’s simple really. Look around your life for machines, and then figure out what people did before there were machines to do it for them. In this spirit I bought a push reel mower and a hand crank coffee grinder. And I know it sounds silly. But you know what, it works.

The best thing is that it actually makes life more fun. The kids get involved, doing laundry becomes a little thing you do everyday rather than an anonymous task that has to get done. And I like that. I don’t think we’re here to get things done, I think we’re here to do things.