Practical Wisdom: A Truth About Being Alive

A couple weeks in a tiny home is teaching me something.

This week, while the rest of the world was busy searching Google for the next thing, the better way, the action that would finally make life feel right, I was sitting in a tiny home, alone, with very few of the normal comforts of my life. And here's what I noticed: I'm fine. More than fine.

I want to be careful not to make this sound simpler than it is. There's real work in learning to be alone. But the longer I sit with the quiet, the more I'm convinced that most of what we believe is required for joy is not required at all. It's desired. Marketed. Habituated. But not required.

The most searched topics online this week were, predictably, entertainment, sports, celebrity news, tax anxiety, and AI tools. Which is to say, people are searching for distraction, escape, information that might protect them, and novelty. On average, we spend 2.5 hours a day on social media alone. Somehow, that’s less appealing in a tiny home out here in the Oregon countryside. There are other things that call my attention.

Yesterday morning, just as the first ray of light was coming up over the horizon, an owl started hooting. Not metaphorically. A real owl, somewhere in the dark just beyond what I could see, calling into the almost-dawn while the world was still deciding whether to wake up. I stepped out on the porch with my French press coffee, (because there's no Keurig here and it turns out I don't miss it,) and I felt something I can only describe as complete.

A robin has taken to hopping up onto that same deck and looking in at me through the glass when I’m inside. I look back. We regard each other with what feels like mutual respect. The frost on the clover some mornings is so precise, so delicate, that it looks like something a very patient artist spent the night creating. There is no television here, so I've been reading. I brought colored pencils and a book of nature outlines I can give shape to.

None of this cost anything. None of it required planning, upgrading, or optimizing. It’s all very peaceful and quiet.

“Enough is enough,” my mother often said – but this is a different application of “enough.”

Here’s the thing I keep turning over: we live in a culture that is extraordinarily good at convincing us that joy is one purchase, one achievement, one experience away. And we believe it, most of us, most of the time, because the alternative is a little unsettling. If joy was always available, if it was sitting right here in the frost and the robin and the smell of coffee steeping in a small pot, then what have we been so busy for?

Before I came here, I assumed I'd miss things. My closet full of choices. Someone cooking for me. My own bed. And honestly? The closet hasn't crossed my mind. The simple meals have been a relief. The bed is fine. What I miss, the only thing I cannot replace, are the people in my day-today life. I don’t miss my bed itself, but I miss Mark in it, right next to me. That one has no substitute and requires no examination. I miss the daily presence of my kids and my grandkids. Everything else I thought I needed turns out to be habit wearing the costume of necessity.

I'm not suggesting we abandon our full lives. I love my full life. But I am suggesting that we may have drastically overestimated what's required to feel alive. This tiny house has no room for excess. Everything here is what's needed and nothing more. And in that constraint, something has opened rather than closed.

The owl doesn't know it gave me a gift. The robin isn't trying to teach me anything. The frost melts by mid-morning and leaves no trace. But I was there for it. That's the whole secret, I think. Not that life needs to be smaller, but that we need to be present enough to actually receive what it's already offering.

What would shift for you if you decided, just for today, that you already have enough to be joyful? Not enough to be comfortable or secure or successful, those are different questions. But enough to feel the familiar aliveness that comes from paying attention to what's right in front of you.

That's what a tiny house and an owl taught me this week. I suspect you already know it too. Sometimes we just need a smaller room to remember.