Changing your life demands creativity; there’s no avoiding it. And it is one of the great pleasures — like being a child again, discovering and mastering the world anew.
At the moment, I am enjoying the thrill of a newly successful mini-experiment, sitting on my backseat ‘couch’: with the hammock still hanging diagonally across my living room (and also across my lap), it occurred to me that it might make a decent desk. So I laid my trusty Chromebook on it in front of me, opened it up, et voila, it works. No more hot lap.
There are so many happy little moments like this, where I have a problem, look around to see what I can adapt to solve it, and almost always find just the thing… even though that thing’s original purpose had nothing to do with its new use.
In such a small space — 25 or so square feet of actual living space not devoted to storage or driving — everything must do (at the very least) double duty. Thus, the hammock becomes a hanging desk; a five gallon bucket originally used to transport agave syrup becomes a toilet, a seat, and an end table; a small cooler transforms into the perfect foot rest.
Last summer, I went to a vandwellers’ meetup called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in the Coconino National Forest outside Flagstaff, Arizona. A few of us newbies bonded over our mutual amazement and joy of discovery.
“Multipurpose!” we kept exclaiming, eyes wide, each time we realized a new use for something.
It was as if we were being liberated from the Matrix itself, looking at the world with new eyes. That’s what this life change is about.
