When people hear that I live on a 42’ sailboat in Ballard, the most common reaction I get is, “You live on a sailboat? Wow. That is SO cool!” I suppose it is. But during the decision and then the transition process I felt anything but cool. I didn’t just say, “Yeah, let’s do it! Let’s sell our house and all our stuff and live simply and shrink our footprint.” I cried and argued and worried and stressed and resisted – qualities and behavior not often associated with cool people. So while it may be “cool” to live on a boat, I feel like an imposter accepting this particular designation.
When my husband first started talking about it, I didn’t take him too seriously. Dan had had so many schemes and plans to move us toward financial freedom over the years that I began calling him “Ralph” after Jackie Gleason’s character from the Honeymooners. “OK, Ralph, sounds great,” I’d say when he presented me with another idea.
I was sure it couldn't happen because, well, what would we do with all our stuff? How would we ever find the time to sort through our things, decide what to keep, what to store and what to toss? How could we stomach putting the house on the market and having strangers traipsing through every day? What about actually moving - leaving our dear little house? Changing our mailing address? It paralyzed me to think of adding such daunting work to all we were already juggling.
Truthfully, we had been toying with the idea for a while. During our many summers cruising the west coast of Canada, we traveled deeply into the rainforest and even more deeply into ourselves. After a month or more on our floating home that provided everything we needed, I would dreamily say, “I would be happy if we lived on the boat full-time. I could do this.” And I really believed I could.
But once Dan started getting serious about it, I learned pretty quickly what a faker I was. I panicked when I realized that this one wasn’t going away. The universe has a bothersome way of calling you out when you start patting yourself on the back at how cool you are. “Oh yeah?” it seems to say, “let’s see just how you deal with THIS.” And suddenly you are looking in the mirror, stark naked, not an undergarment or hair-product or tube of mascara in sight to disguise the flaws, the raw truth of how far you still have to go to that perceived coolness to which so many of us aspire. Grasping at straws, I demanded the impossible: a boat with three dedicated sleeping rooms, a couch, and a master bed that could be gotten in and out of from either side. “It won’t happen,” I secretly thought. That way I would never be exposed.
The turning point for me came when I started realizing what Dan had been seeing for years. I saw where the housing market was headed, felt the rumblings under our economic foundation, and knew that what had once seemed like a lifestyle choice with financial benefits had now become a financial necessity that would reap lifestyle benefits. For years we had been making good on our commitment to educating our daughters and turning them out debt-free. We are living in a world in which education is increasingly becoming a privilege of the wealthy and we wanted our daughters to have a fighting chance. But it was costing us dearly.
We were also worried about retirement and health care. Realistically speaking, we are living in a world that does not care for it’s elderly. Absurdly expensive health insurance covers only a portion of bills for serious illnesses. I have watched friends with excellent health insurance go through savings and retirement to pay for cancer treatment. They had worked their whole lives and then were forced to hand everything over to a flawed medical system. Yikes. How would we afford health care after we stopped working jobs that provide it? How do people pay taxes, buy food, and keep up house payments when earning power has diminished? If retirement accounts are not sufficient for a (hopefully) long future, then what do we do?
It finally made sense to me. I got it. Light dawned on Marblehead. "OK, Ralph, I'm with you on this one..." So we started moving together in the same direction.
We found the perfect sailboat, one that met all my requirements and didn't break the bank. We sold our house just before things really went downhill and we sold or gave away most of our belongings. Our friends were in awe. “How did you do it?” “How did you decide what to keep and what to give away?”
Here’s how. We went through our stuff and made some hard decisions. Not hard for Dan. As far as he was concerned, it could all go. But for me everything had meaning, however small. It was excruciating. One day, while crying as I bubble-wrapped a vase that I felt I couldn’t bear to part with, one of my closest friends stopped by. She held me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and asked me three questions. “Do you need this on the boat?” (No, I said falteringly.) “Will you be passing this down to your daughters someday?” (Ummm… No.) “Can you get something else like it if you truly need it?” (I guess….) “Then the only question left,” she wisely concluded, “is how much do you want to sell it for in your next yard sale?”
During yard sales, my heart would occasionally seize watching people consider certain items. For example, the hand-painted Japanese umbrella, a gift from a dear friend who had recently committed suicide. I asked the interested woman what she was going to do with it, resisting the temptation to grab it and shout, “IT’S NOT FOR SALE – I CHANGED MY MIND!” Turns out, she was a teacher who was planning a lesson on Japan and wanted to decorate her classroom. That sounded so much better than keeping it in a box in my closet (which I had been doing) or putting it in storage (which I would have done). When we cleaned out our attic, everything went to the dump. What was I thinking, saving all that stuff? What was I keeping it for?
We are addicted to stuff. We hang on to it and it accumulates. The more places we have to put our stuff, the longer we delay the decision about what to do with it. It’s easy to put it off when you can close a door and forget about it for a time. But if you are like me, it eventually scratches at the inside of the door, following you around like a bad smell, whispering in your ear, “clean me, organize me, sort me.”
Things have a life, an energy, and they are not supposed to stay with us forever. There are ancient practices of moving things around or passing things on that are no longer needed so that they may continue to have life and give pleasure. I began to understand this and embrace it. The more I gave away, the more I wanted to give away. I began to feel strangely free.
Had we chosen to downsize and live in a smaller land abode, I probably would have moved everything there and tried to make it fit. Or boxed it up and put it in – THE ATTIC! Only to throw it or give it away 10-20 years from now. Or worse yet, leave it for my kids to deal with.
Since moving on the boat, we live in daily contact with nature, and I love that. Our neighbors are like-minded, wonderful people who have also chosen this alternative lifestyle. We are living debt-free and have a significantly smaller carbon footprint. And, we are looking into retirement in Central America where the living is cheap, the health care is great, and the expat community is growing steadily. Through the process of making this move, I learned that that attitude and determination can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. And, I must say, I miss nothing that I have given away. All we own now is contained in a 10’ x 7’ storage unit. And even that is beginning to feel like too much.
How cool is that?
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