“This will be a time of restraint and contraction, a time of great uncertainty and instability. The less burden you have to carry regarding your possessions and regarding relationships that you are engaged in that have no real value or purpose, the more energy you will have and the more resources you will have internally to consider what you must do.”

– Simplicity

During the COVID-19 Pandemic it has been necessary, and sometimes even easy, to drop things that no longer serve us. We find out what we can live without because, well, they are not at our fingertips anymore.

It is a great time to re-evaluate what freedom means to us, what simplicity means.

To some adventurers, “van life” has been a means of seeing the world and having possessions at a bare minimum. Life’s responsibilities stripped down, the open road, and living frugally and simply.

Now there is another consideration that puts van life at the whim of travel restriction during a pandemic.

“In some ways, Covid-19 has been like a game of musical chairs for overlanders, who have found themselves in varying situations depending on where they happened to be when the music stopped.”

BBC News

Being able to adapt to change, to learn to restrain yourself, so that others may simply live and so you don’t find yourself swept up in a crisis, is a great strength in these times. What does this mean for you? What are you willing or not willing to question?

Perhaps minimalism has a tipping point when it begins to put you at risk. To own few things can feel deeply freeing. But what do you need to own in order to prepare for a future that is unlike the past?

The world is changing. We must change with it.

– Marshall Vian Summers

Resources for COVID19 and spiritual development: NewMessage.org/covid