Today I will share the tiniest slice of my brainmeats with you. I’m in the middle of packing for the big move, editing the first draft of the fourth book of the Warpworld series, trying to come up with funny and clever dialogue for another writing collaboration, and cursing my singularly stubborn stuffed sinuses.

We move a lot. If you’ve followed these Coconut Chronicles for even a year you already know that. It can get tiring, at times, all this moving. Packing, unpacking, packing, unpacking, et cetera. It can also be enlightening and inspiring.

Remember the horrible couch?

Well, we finally unloaded that abomination. Except the new-ish couch wouldn’t fit through the awkward narrow door/hallway here. There were some frustrated tears and then we dragged out the other not-comfortable couch from the back room. That is what we have been sitting on ever since.

Sitting on and complaining about and vowing to get a more better couch after we moved.

On Sunday we had a small garage sale to rid ourselves of extraneous goods.

“Want to sell the couch?” Prez asked.

“Sure,” I said.

We sold it. We were couchless. It would be four weeks until we left Nelson and we had nothing to sit on.

Ever resourceful, we dragged a piece of high density foam out to the living room, covered it with an old comforter and tossed some pillows and other blankets on top. Viola, couch!

This is the new couch

Guess what? It’s really comfy!

All this time we have put up with back pain and ugly clocks and wayward cushions because of what a couch is “supposed” to be. I mean, what would people think if they came to our home and saw that our living room furniture consisted of a piece of foam and some blankets?

Except why do we care about that? Because our society says we must have a couch does that mean we MUST HAVE A COUCH? What about other cultures that are perfectly happy sitting on the floor? On cushions? With blankets?

This is what the nomad lifestyle, with all its annoyances and uncertainties, does for me. It reminds me that everything is a construct. Free will is a gift. We have more choices than we know. And sometimes all it takes is the will to say, “I do not need a couch.”