My wife and I recently reintegrated into the USA after having lived overseas for about a year. This by no means makes me an expert, but it does give me a little bit of experience with what I mean to share!
For those of you who have lived and/or worked overseas, you know that moving back to the USA can be a strange experience as you are confronted with a culture that is, in many ways, much more consumption driven than the majority of the world. Some people are even proud of this, gladly proclaiming the USA to be a country of excess as if this was something to brag about. This time coming back into the country, however, I felt very smothered by material goods to the point where I had to start selling some of them off.
Now, you have to understand that my wife and I are in between fields at this point in time. We do non-profit work, but we are waiting and trying to figure out where our next step will be. We don’t know where or what exactly, but we are both leaning towards a culture and country that is more in the developing stage. In other words, someplace poor. This current trend in our life, coupled with the reverse culture shock that we were going through, really opened my eyes up to the excess in my own life. This could be anything from shoes, clothes, camping gear, knives or whatever your poison might be.
So what am I getting at? This got me thinking about how I, and probably some of you, have forgotten one of the key parts of bushcraft. It isn’t about how much gear you have or how much stuff you can buy. Owning lots of knives doesn’t improve our performance no more than always reading and never practicing improves our carving. Bushcraft, in a lot of respects, is about how much you can do with a limited amount of gear.
This has led me on a personal little conquest to really unload excess from my life and live differently. I started thinking about things like, selling extra knives so that I could donate that money towards people who have real needs - like water, food and medicine for preventable diseases. I don’t need 20 knives. Heck, I don’t even need all five of the ones I have now. I don’t need 10 different cooking set-ups or 6 backpacks. I should keep what I need, maybe a spare item here and there, and spread the wealth I have been blessed with to those in greater need.
So I guess all this is to say that I would challenge you to do the same. I’m not tooting my own horn or trying to come off as pious. All I am saying is that we should return to some of the basics of bushcraft - enjoying God’s creation with limited resources and realizing how much we can do on so little. The excess, we can get rid of, lighten the load in our own lives, and maybe even help some people along the way.
Thanks for reading, Bill
