In the past few months, I’ve found myself returning to a simple question—one that isn’t easy to answer honestly: what do I really need?
It didn’t arrive all at once. It surfaced gradually, almost unnoticed, in the middle of practical decisions: what to bring, what to leave behind, what to sell, what to give away, what fits and what doesn’t.
I used to think I needed a fairly robust setup to work well. Two large displays (27” and 24”, for the geeks), a Mac Pro desktop, an external webcam and a professional microphone on an articulated arm, all set up on a standing desk with a high stool—a comfortable workstation built carefully over the years. Today, it all fits into a backpack: a 16” MacBook Pro paired with a lightweight portable monitor, a keyboard, and a webcam with a built-in microphone. And what’s most surprising—or perhaps most revealing—is that the comfort is the same. Only now, it comes with something else: lightness.
That same reflection started to show up in other parts of everyday life. Clothing, for example. Before a recent 45-day trip across five countries—by plane, train, and bus—I paused to consider what I would actually need. I reduced everything to a minimum. And still, when I came back, I had the feeling I could have taken even less. There’s a quiet habit of always adding “just a little extra,” just in case. In the end, that “extra” wasn’t needed.
Now, looking ahead to the months leading up to the journey, that question begins to grow. If it was possible to downsize my work setup to a backpack, and realize that fewer clothes would have been enough, what happens when that same logic meets an entire home? The space inside the motorhome is smaller, no doubt. But at the same time, everything around it expands.
Maybe this isn’t exactly a trade-off between less and more, but a shift in how I understand space. And perhaps what matters most isn’t the downsizing itself, but what becomes visible when things fall away.
Little by little, as these objects leave the scene, it becomes clearer that much of what once felt essential was, in fact, habit. Learned comforts. References I had been holding onto without even noticing.
I don’t have a final answer for what is truly essential, but I do notice a different kind of attention to what I choose to carry with me. Less as accumulation, more as intention. Less “just in case,” more out of real need.
And in the middle of this process, a simple idea begins to take shape: opening the house, inviting friends, and letting things circulate. A yard sale, but also a lively gathering. A way to reduce and to share, to bring back to life what had been sitting quietly in storage, cabinets, and drawers. That these objects may find new hands, new uses, and become part of new stories. And, at the same time, help fund the journey ahead.
By letting go of excess and reducing to what is truly necessary, the journey is taking shape - lighter.
Fernando Murray
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