A Van Life Philosophy
Living on the road in a small space is easy, ok well not easy, but easier than living in a small space when you are tied in one location. I don’t know why for definite, but I have a theory that it might be that when you’re on the road, you’re so busy collecting experiences and memories that you don’t collect stuff.
For me, when you’re in one place you start to get complacent and begin to accumulate things; whether it’s clothes, books, stationary (I’m just thinking of examples that relate to my collective tendencies) or plants, they all being to appear.
Perhaps when you’re on the road the constant sense of moving doesn’t allow time to stop and accumulate. I don’t know, all I know is that now, whilst we are hooked up in the van in one small corner (technically not a corner) of the UK we have started to acquire, a lot of stuff.
We’ve also got pretty bad at budgeting, shopping regularly, and cooking wholesome hearty food. I’m really not sure what the excuse is but I think it goes along the lines of; day jobs, commitments, family issues, and circumstance. It becomes hard to think outside the box, or in an elevated manner. Everything becomes so clogged down and difficult.
I have to remind myself, that just because we are temporarily stationary, we don’t have to leave behind that ‘on the road’ mentality.
Budgeting is still a perfectly acceptable and often sought-after practice in the majority of adult lives, as is regular, sensible shopping and also cooking. Somewhere along the line we forgot that those things apply to every-day life and not just our vanlife adventures.
It then makes me think that surely, if we applied the same mentality we had on the road to our current existence, we could be so much better off. We could have order, and prioritise the idea that happiness does not come from things, it does not come from having material possessions but it comes from living in your everyday existence. A good cup of coffee, savoured first thing in the morning, is better than one that is rushed and hurried on the way out the door.
It’s not like when we were travelling that we lay in every day, we didn’t – we set alarms and got up early to keep a routine, to hold on to a sense of normality that helped to add a meaning to the experience we were having, rather than it just being one long holiday. So why can’t we manage that now, why shouldn’t we set that alarm a little bit earlier to savour that time in the mornings, just to start the day in the way we mean to go on.
Or take the time to cook from scratch each evening, something healthy and fulfilling. I mean, whilst we travelled in the Iveco we had less in the sense of food storage then we have now, so I don’t know where we missed the boat on that one?
There are times when I must remind myself to pay attention to the scenery around us now. Everyday there is nature, there are constant calls of rooks, the deer wait to be seen in the fields and birds of prey are regular sights here. Just because it isn’t golden eagles and otters, doesn’t mean it’s any less spectacular. It still deserves to be appreciated in much the same way it was on our adventure.
One of the things we really took away from our time on the road, was the attitude of other people we met. The people that we spent most of our time with lived busy, full lives with day jobs and commitments, yet they were never rushed or hurried. They always found pleasure in the small things; friends, a good cup of coffee, the tree that they saw every day out the same window.
There are lessons to be learnt here. Lessons that can be carried through into our every-day lives to make them more meaningful, satisfying, authentic.
If we could this so successfully on the road, then we should be able to do it now; in a small space, in one place. Our van life philosophy shouldn’t just be one for the road, it should be one for the everyday.
