Relative Simplicity

I've been doing my laundry by hand here, since for some reason the cheapest laundry around is 4 kaui per item (about 60 cents).  Anyway, I did a whole bunch the other day and was folding my laundry on my bed.  I got it all stacked up, and my thought was, "Shoot!  I have a TON of shirts!"

There they are, all 15 of them (about half of the shirts I brought to China).  This is a ton of shirts??  Not compared to how many I used to have!

Somehow, in having to reduce my belongings to two 50-pound suitcases and a carry-on, my standard of abundance has been re-set.  It was hard to decide what to take to China and what to give away or throw away.  It was also a lot of work.  But now, it feels freeing to live more simply, with just the things I need and not a lot of extra junk.

Having said that, I still live with far more stuff than most of the world.  It's tempting to pat myself on the back for living simply, but take a look at some of the mess we trainees hauled across the ocean:

And that's just a fraction of it!  So I may be getting a taste of the joys of simplicity, but it's definitely relative simplicity.