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Tao and the Art of #VanLife
On the wisdom of viewing yourself as a mobile tiny house
This isn’t an article about my experiences as a #vanlifer. If you haven’t lived in a van, here’s the gist: it’s great in all the ways you think it would be great. You blast old rock n’ roll and drive into sunsets and spend the night in the forest and wake up to sweeping vistas and open roads. You feel free. It sucks in all the ways you think it would suck. Cooking is more difficult and showering is ad-hoc and sometimes you can’t find a spot to sleep in and if your car breaks down, well, there goes your house with it. You feel fragile.
There aren’t many surprises, just the qualitative shift in understanding from imagining something to experiencing it. That shift — that’s what this article is about.
Spiritual teachers the world over have been telling us all for centuries that we need to stop identifying with ourselves in these forms if we want to be happy. Whether they tell you to detach from your body or from your Ego, from your self-concept or from your conditioning, from your thoughts or your beliefs, from the past and future — the point is, there’s something in your way of looking at yourself, what you think you are, that could be changed for the better.
