Path from Lyon to Le Puy, France 2009.

Making Light ~ Take Less

Less doesn’t weigh as much

Here’s a real quick and simple one. Go through your packing list, and find at least one thing, pull it out of your kit, and leave it at home. You decide. But if you’re like most people, you won’t miss it. At least not that much. And you’ll soon forget that you miss it, or even why you thought you needed it in the first place.

This was one of the earliest lessons I learned, and I keep learning it better all the time. It’s best expressed by Ray Jardine in his book Beyond Backpacking (page 47, “The Jardine Approach”). To me, it reduces to:

“If I don’t have it, I won’t need.”

So far, I haven’t even come close. Think about it. Try it. Instead of worrying about “What if…?”, think about solving, “How would I…?”