Not a Warehouse Under Siege

I have learned something the long way around.

The teaching was never asceticism.
It was trust in circulation.

That sentence would have sounded irresponsible to me once. Maybe even dangerous. Because long before I ever crossed an ocean, long before I learned how little I could carry and still live well, something else had already been installed in the body.

Survival.

Not as a philosophy. As an inheritance.

A survivalist posture has been encoded into our species through uncountable hard winters, droughts, famines, wars, and devastations. It moved through family stories and unspoken grief. It passed from mother to fetus not through language, but through chemistry. Vigilance in the blood. Eat when you can. Keep what you find. Don’t trust tomorrow.

Babies buried before their first birthday will do that to a lineage.

So when I walk into homes now, I don’t see greed. I see history. Closets jammed with extra umbrellas. Coats that haven’t been worn in years. Children’s toys that belong to children who now have children of their own. Attics sealed shut, untouched for nearly a decade. Muffin tops that unbuckle belts the moment the door closes behind them.

None of this is failure. It is memory without a place to go.

For six years I’ve lived differently, not as an ideology, but as a consequence. I’ve moved through Europe with my belongings reduced to what I could physically carry onto a train or ride down a mountain on a bike. That kind of life strips language of its abstractions. You learn quickly what earns its weight.

Here’s what surprised me most.

Everywhere I lived, people were drowning in provisions.
And everything I actually needed had a way of showing up.

Not because I manifested it.
Because it was already there.

Often at the bottom of one of those overstuffed closets. On an empty afternoon. The internet down for a couple of hours. Hands doing honest work. Something long forgotten re-entering circulation.

I didn’t buy it. I freed it.

This is where an old story snapped into focus for me. Jesus didn’t arrive in Jerusalem on a horse he owned. He borrowed a donkey. He returned it. He didn’t stockpile the means of arrival. He had access.

Ownership says: I must secure the future.
Access says: the future is responsive.

We’ve misunderstood that teaching because we misunderstood heaven. We were trained to think of it as a place we go after we die, rather than a way of inhabiting life now once the calibration shifts. “Store up treasure in heaven” was never about delayed reward. It was about investing in what cannot rust because it is alive.

Language in the mouth.
Presence in the body.
Discernment in relationship.
A trained eye.
A steady hand.
A nervous system that can rest inside uncertainty.

Those things travel.

I’m not a minimalist. Minimalism is often just fear dressed in restraint. And I’m not a maximalist either. That’s appetite without discernment. What I’ve become, if anything, is a migratory accumulator. My life expands, but only in ways that remain portable. What I gather compounds rather than clutters.

Most people today live as if life were a warehouse under siege. Fortify. Stockpile. Seal the attic. Guard against loss at all costs. And in doing so, they quietly lose circulation, which is where life actually happens.

Trust in circulation doesn’t deny history. It completes it. It lets the survival instinct finally stand down. It teaches the body that winter no longer defines the calendar. That provision can arrive through relationship instead of hoarding. That safety can come from responsiveness rather than excess.

We didn’t become this way because we were foolish.
We became this way because we survived.

Now some of us are learning how to live.

And that requires a different kind of courage entirely.

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