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I think a lot about what it means to have “only what you need.” Mostly I’m considering this from my personal point of view. There’s this particular, snarly species of overwhelm: hundreds of daily choices about which chair to sit in and what book to read and what meal to make and what color to wear, and which expression to adopt when negotiating shared spaces. Et fucking cetera. I’m so absolutely tired, and that’s just the baseline.*

So it draws me, this idea of essentials. And still, I also consider “having only what you need” through a skeptic’s lens.

Because: how to define “need?” How to balance reflexive cultural disgust at having “too much,” with the very real not-enough all around me? Why are we trying to get rid of pieces of a good life in the first place? Where are ideas of “abundance” in this? Where is attachment to ideas about stoic simplicity, spartan purity, the narrow path…non-attachment? Where is privilege? (Who suffers, for example, if I manage to shed—in a way that benefits me—some large percentage of my material belongings, or my activities? Who takes up the slack?)

None of this has decided me against the fundamental wisdom of essentials. The attempted reduction of a day, a life, a room, a house, a schedule is an act of basic sanity for me personally. I would not care to speak for anyone else. I’m not convinced it’s attainable, particularly given the caveats above. Maybe it’s not something an individual can affect—only a community, a society, a culture.

But I like it as a guideline. I like it for one thing because I like my sanity, which lately feels in need of some defending. Also because it has a clarifying effect on the heart. Whether that clarity is an aid or an agitation to the cause of sanity, I’m not sure. Poetry doesn’t know either, but it does attend.

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*If that sounds like nothing in particular to you, I’m not that surprised. What has been surprising is learning how out-of-the-main-stream I am in this matter—and also how that’s shifting. It has been fascinating—among other things—to watch more people circle toward an experience something like my own, as the pandemic becomes endemic and we’re all still spinning spinning spinning in stressful ambiguity.