The Project Begins

I am what some would call a pack rat. I keep anything I think I might even need a piece of at some distant, unforeseeable future date. When I was 19 I moved to Hawai'i for college. At the end of my first year I had to go home for the summer. This meant I had to store all my stuff. This was one of the major turning points in my life. I realized that day that I had entirely to much stuff. I never realized this before because I lived in a house, and had a big room, and never had to move so far that I couldn't easily take all my stuff to the new big room.

At this point in college I already knew that I would spend the rest of my life roaming from place to place, it's just the way I am. A lot of people call me a free spirit, I don't see myself that way. I just love learning. The funnest way to learn new things is to go live in a new place, and surround yourself with new people. But I digress. Rewind to life turning point; I decided that day when I had to pack up all the shit that was tying me to this place (don't get me wrong, Hawai'i is great but it is just a stop on the highway of my life.) I really needed to downsize. At first I just thought I'll get ride of all none essential things, like clothes that no longer fit, or silly trinkets that have no purpose, basically the junk that we collect in our everyday lives. This idea snowballed after a few trans-continental flights between my home town in Tennessee and Hawai'i.

I came to dread packing. Firstly, because it meant making the decisions of what to take with me and what to leave behind (not to be seen again for the next 6 months till I was in Tennessee again.) Secondly, because I had so much stuff that I always went back and forth with 4 bags (2 checks, a carry on, and my school backpack.) All this stuff is really hard to manage when its all over wight and you're by yourself in the airport. I started to think about my future, traveling from place to place and how hard it was going to be to get all my stuff to where ever I am. That's when I decided, knowing as I knew the kind of life I wanted to lead, I should not own more material things than I can carry comfortably on my person. I thought about roller luggage but this seemed to bulky and not comfortable to carry around if I didn't have a residence yet, so I decided on a backpacking pack. It has the advantages of being much bigger than a regular backpack with the perk of still having straps that make it easy and comfortable to carry. at least this is my logic.

So here I am in the senior year of college, about to graduate in spring, about to go out into what will be the rest of my life, and its time to put my plan into action.