The Oregon Trail
What Is Most Essential To You?
Today is my Mom’s 60th birthday. Happy birthday Mom, I love you!
There is a running joke in our family about an old video game called “The Oregon Trail”. The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy game set in the 1850’s, the object of which is to move your family from Missouri to Oregon by wagon. The game ends if all five members of your family die before making it there.
My bothers and I used to play this game in elementary school during computer class. We thought it was so funny that one of the ways you could lose the game was by having your character die from dysentery. I remember telling my mom about this game, and she always thought it was funny too. She used to jokingly refer to my PhD dissertation as my “dysentery” (a pretty accurate description).
Thinking about my mom, and The Oregon Trail, made me also think about what is most essential in life. At the very beginning of the game, you are faced with a difficult choice. You have to choose what supplies to purchase for your journey. Once you make this choice, you cannot turn back. How you choose has a significant effect on whether you will make it or not. Should you spend all of your money on food, or buy a gun to hunt along the way? Should you pack a spare wheel? Medicine?
Your life is a wagon. It can only hold so much, and what you choose to put on it will greatly affect what happens throughout your journey. If it is too full, your journey will be slow, your wheels will break, and things may fall off as you cross difficult terrain. If it is too empty, you will be lacking what you need when life presents its inevitable challenges to you.
Lately, I have been trying to simplify my life and focus on what matters to me most. There is only so much that we can do with our lives. We have to choose. Thinking about our lives in terms of the choice at the beginning of The Oregon Trail helps us determine what is truly essential. If you had to permanently choose what to put in your wagon, what would you bring?
Minimalism is great for the psyche and is the best way to get ahead financially too!
your posts are concise yet so full of meaning. I enjoy them a lot. The question you pose has many answers. On the most pragmatic, physical level I did have to answer the same, when I decided to reduce all my property to one backpack. This is when, after much deliberation, I discovered with surprise that a man can live a happpy live with one pair of trousers. So that part of work I am done with, and if anyone is interested I could provide a list of items...
Answering the same question on a deeper level, we should be thinking about what fills our attention and how we spend our time, and how many of these things do not help. On a yet deeper level, it is about what makes us humans: our core values that we should consciously carry along and develop, or ditch.