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The Shovel Method

by Christian Huebner 

I’m visiting friends in Hawaii this week, and pondering the wisdom of the Shovel Method.

For those unfamiliar, the Shovel Method is the way of beach-going first spotted by my Hawaiian friends when they took their infant daughter to the shoreline one sunny afternoon.  After unloading multiple beach bags and stroller baskets full of towels, toys, lotions, layers of clothing, snorkels, sandals and the like, they spotted another new mommy arriving further down the beach.  In her arms were: one baby, one towel, and a single plastic shovel for infant amusement.  Oh, for it to be that simple, said my friends.  The Shovel Method was born.

Minimalist living – intentionally paring down material possessions to the bare necessities – has become something of a fad recently.  There are movements of people who will pick an arbitrary number of total possessions to own, say one hundred, and force themselves to abandon all else.  There’s even a blog devoted to the simple like on the New York Times website.

The attraction seems to be on a number of different fronts.  There’s the obvious convenience factor: life can seem a lot simpler if you have fewer things to keep track of.  On a very small scale, I can vouch for this: the morning of my flight to Honolulu, I took a look at my over-crammed duffel and decided that I didn’t want to carry any more than could fit in my old school backpack.  It was a breeze going through airport security.

There’s also the Robinson Crusoe element.  Part of why we like to rough it is because of the creativity it inspires – nay, demands – in us.  My siblings and I didn’t have a superabundance of toys growing up, but we did have an unfinished basement – a.k.a., a spaceship, Broadway theater, mural palate, and carnival ground.  Many years later, moving into my first apartment and without the money to buy a toaster, I found out that my grandma’s old cast iron skillet greased up with a little butter made better bagels than I’d ever had before.  Part of the flavor I enjoyed was the sweet nectar of my own ingenuity.  I imagine that Aloha babies raised on the Shovel Method similarly plumb the many virtues of a trowel, from scooping to chewing to sand nation-building.

And then there’s the spiritual element.  Speak of “traveling light,” and you don’t just get a sigh of relief from the prospect of heavy suitcases and obscene numbers of moving boxes.  You get a fire in the imagination: an idea of peace, of contentment, of blessed detachment and holy indifference.  You get a hint of freedom from Lilliputian concerns to spend time on the big things.  God, yes, and in a related vein, a fuller experience of the present moment: the people we’re with, the place we’re at.  Anyone who’s taken a step back to compare the time he spent looking at Waikiki on souvenir magnets and commemorative cups compared with the time he spent looking at Waikiki knows what I mean.

The Shovel Method has a number of virtues.  Don’t count me a whole-hearted evangelist for the movement, though.

If minimalist living has a blind spot, it’s in understanding why we acquire and keep material possessions.  It’s not just avarice, or for utility, or even for beauty, though all of these play their part.  We also collect things because they preserve pieces of ourselves.

Let me explain.  During a recent visit my parents’ home, I received orders to sort through three boxes of stuff I’d left in storage in their basement.  It took me the entire afternoon.  A Scooby Doo necktie, a fossilized buffalo horn, seventeen identical hummingbird posters – none of these were worth keeping to anyone, except to me.  Each evoked a set of memories, pieces of my history, that I hadn’t remembered in years.  In short, I got stuck wading through nostalgia.  As I put each of these items in the trash pile, it occurred to me that if I hadn’t recalled these memories except upon sight of these particular knickknacks, then odds were that now I would not ever remember them again.  By throwing away the stuff, I was quite literally throwing away a part of my history, a part of me.

We know this about ourselves, even if unconsciously.  It’s the impulse behind everything from “Hawaii Hang Loose” t-shirts to wedding guest books to Jacob’s Ebeneezer stone: we sense a moment is something we will want to preserve – or ought to preserve – and so we grasp for a material marker for this piece of ourselves.

Here’s the rub then: neither the Shovel Method nor the souvenir impulse is complete without the other.  It’s in our proper nature to sink ourselves into the world around us, and it’s our perfection to lose those same attachments.  Not because the attachments were wrong—quite the contrary, they are necessary for the essential task of losing.  The sacrifice of Isaac means nothing if Abraham hasn’t poured all of himself, quite properly, into his son.

And with that, I’m headed to the beach.  What I’ll bring remains to be seen.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)