The IWALLK Essays - 1. Strange Simplicity

I once heard that heroin addiction mercifully reduces the complexities of the modern world for the user. It focuses a person's attention on one thing. It can actually be a type of freedom--at least freedom from everything else... The further one falls into its grasp, the more one realizes just how many other things aren't necessary as long as this one need is met each day.

It is said that the addicted one is lazy and can't hold down a job. But that's not true at all! One sometimes has to make a significant amount of money each day in order to support the habit, whether that be a legal job, or begging, borrowing, or stealing. Any of those things can be a "job."

It is too bad that his or her needs have been so misplaced. Yet, it does show just how financially ambitious a person can be when they really need something. Strangely, it also shows what the (unfortunate, in this case) simplification of life can do for a person. And truthfully, it just is what it is. We are where we are--each of us. And each person is different of course. Some addicted folks manage to live relatively "normal" lives even into old age. As we've seen more frequently lately, other people cannot find their way out and risk their lives every day on an ever-shortening, one way road. It does not help that the presence of super-powerful substances like fentanyl and carfentanil are mixed into what is supposed to be heroin, making every dose unpredictably deadly, due to very real risk of overdose. This is a situation that would be cured by the regulatory forces of legalization. but that's a digression for another essay.

Unfortunately, this kind of simplicity also rules the lives of people who have no say in the matter. Disability can do this too. Someone paralyzed from the waist down and restricted to a wheelchair can never walk up a flight of stairs. And therefore, any more complex lifestyle that includes the use of regular stairways is not part of his or her life. Without assigning moral value to the inherited or learned limitations each of us have in life, often times the simplicity of a situation can be the only relief.

I myself am feeling the restrictions of my own developing disability. I've learned that without a major medical intervention, my life is going to become involuntarily simpler and simpler--meaning my choices are going to become more and more limited. Each day I get out of bed with a million things I want to do, but then I remember to go slow or pay the price. It isn't an option anymore. Sometimes, I get discouraged and just sit, thinking about how I can more efficiently accomplish what I don't have the energy to accomplish, and then the day is gone.

My situation is kind of like an inverted version of the addicted life. I am addicted to my projects, but this one medical thing is forcing me to simplify not only my daily plans, but also to anticipate a more realistic next five years' worth of effort toward what have been my personal life goals. We all have something to limit us. This is my limitation.

This awkward situation is made doubly so, due to the philosophy I have developed about applying the ideals of comfortably downsizing for financial stability in order to afford sustaining myself by my creative efforts alone. I am SO close to achieving this for myself, that I even dream of setting up ways to help other conscientious objectors to conventionality in their own fight for freedom, maybe allowing many others to find a lifestyle that even sustains happiness.

In other words, it seems like cheating for me to drive, when I found that walking was the ultimate means of personal transportation. But I have no choice at all anymore. In a terrible irony for me personally, walking (the thing I love the most and has been so healthy for me--the center upon which this very blog is built) is the hardest thing for me to do now.

I have to participate in a frightening health care system that I find over respected, overpaid, impersonal and accounting for more covered-up and willfully ignored error than any other comparable for-profit industry. This is after my years of railing about how many ways I can't trust the system. Now I have to literally trust the rest of my life to it. And, there will be more errors.

Overcoming the feeling of hypocrisy for abandoning such publicly espoused ideals has been one of my greatest challenges lately. Why can't it be okay to retire from walking, by driving, in the same way I retired from being houseless by building a home? Why can't I simply accept that the requirement of being poked and prodded by clinicians I can hardly trust is most important if I want to still do things that are relevant in the world and or instructive for myself and others?

As I am finally back in the medical system for the first time in two years, I suppose that shows my mind is made up, whether I am admitting it or not. I'm participating in the American Game involuntary now, even as I know for a fact is destroying many aspects of life on earth has to be my fate.

I am proud of the years (fully accounted for here at this blog) that I walked away from reasonless conventionality and needless materialism. My sometimes radical and risky exploits in wallking around the nation were to prove that the world is not as we have been told it is. I literally saw my the increasing complexity of our country from the outside and told you all about it from a simpler viewpoint. Many times a day my mind is distracted by a scene or image from the days of those Journeys. To be able to go to hundreds of different areas of the country in my own mind now and relive the adventure, is one of my greatest gifts.

This summer was going to be an opportunity to expand the development of my property. But instead, my focus is pretty much entirely upon reinforcing my shelter; turning it into a house and preparing for next winter. And, the ironies continue to arise. Where I walked in and out of my land to the main road last winter in snow shoes, even when painful--the simplest means of travel, I must now find a different way. So, I bought a Jeep to be my glorified wheelchair. The only logical thing left to do is have a cheap snowmobile next winter that I can drive out to the edge of the seasonally-impassable private road, where I will park my Jeep. Then I'll take the Jeep where I need to go and return to the parking spot for a snowmobile ride back to my house. This all costs money and I am becoming less able to earn a living.

I am doing everything I can to arrange funds, including applying to Social Security for disability. I think I can eventually pull it all together, so that I am at least able to survive materially. If I am able to find a procedure that improves my heart function, I will immediately return to my more lofty goals, which include creating a way for at-risk people to be set up with simple, turnkey homes, as I am doing for myself.

The development of SoftAcres (my land) - with it's comfortable cabin (coming soon), plenty of power with no electric bill (as it is now), plenty of water with no water bill (as it is now), no-waste sewage (as it is now), then with the addition of an organic garden and solar heated radiant flooring - is the prototype for these turnkey homes, what I am calling, "Homes for Good." No lifestyle I know of which still allows for complete personal freedom could be simpler than an ecologically friendly, no-rent nor mortgage, free powered, free watered, free heated, place to begin a new life...or end an old one.

My success will prove the efficacy of the concept. My situation even now already does prove that it is possible for a houseless person to find a home and live so reasonably and sustainably. With a very small carbon footprint, existing in tune with nature and so inexpensively allows a person to work at whatever he or she wants to makes this simple life as idyllic as any life can be. In fact, it even shows how a physically disabled person – like myself - can live an independent life.

Simplicity can be strange. It can be the only thing that works sometimes. Or, it can be the last resort. My hope though, is that someday people will make it their first choice.