Excess

I just gathered up and threw out my body weight in garbage. Two years ago the wife and I, having just been set free from the raising of three children, two horses and a gaggle of miscellaneous pets, took a little apartment in town in an attempt to scale way down and take a test drive in a life of neat and tidy smallness. Apparently I’ve been doing it wrong as I managed to place seemingly important things here and there over the months only to gather them into three large boxes two years into this and haul them out to the dumpster, forcing me into a sweat and a reevaluation of the term tidy.

These many months have brought much light to a subject I desperately desired to absorb and feel out, a fabulous lightness of being; a simplistic manner of going through life unencumbered by the weight of the excesses of the twenty first century consumer.

As I said, in many ways I seem to have been going about it all wrong.

This infatuation with traveling light is really more a matter of soul than of property, although the two are very much interrelated. Foregoing the trappings of too many sporting arms and fly rods, cars, clothes and multimedia apparati has been a blessing. I now manage to better enjoy fishing with only a couple of rods that force me to push my abilities on the water rather than relying on a stick to cover any given situation. A single rifle and brace of shotguns has me stalking the woods, fields and marshes with much more care and thoughtfulness, thus creating a more aware and self reliant hunter. It is one area of my life where this lightening of the load in the name of philosophical enlightenment has paid off.

And now I find myself trying to qualify my pipe and tobacco passion. This is one area of my life where I cannot seem to reason that less is more. Well, at least not with the pipes. The tobacco journey has been an interesting one insofar as I have actually come to the realization that a mere handful of fine blends will keep me happy. There is, however, the fact that I have, by count, some 60 plus blends resting in canning jars that I absolutely do not want to part with since they can, to reason with excess, be used as “something different for a change” blends that will keep me puffing something other than the staples for many years.

Pipes are a whole different story. I determined at one point that I needed a substantial rotation of pipes so that even in a prolonged smoking frenzy I would never be without a clean, dry, sweet pipe. That number managed to come out to around 50 pipes, although it has dwindled somewhat recently. Not by much though.

Now I am in a state of mind where I am reasoning that those pipes, mostly of modest but decent quality – what one would call perfectly serviceable – should be replaced one at a time with very fine pieces that appeal to my sense of design and aesthetic perfection. Stanwell, Peterson and Savinelli are falling to Castello, Ser Jacopo, Dunhill and the like. My current mania has me drooling over pipes by S. Bang, Joura and Negoita. What to do, what to do!? Perfectly good and absolutely acceptable blue collar pipes (that, by the way, mirror my own place in this world) are laid aside, no, given away, to make room for something that presents itself as artistically superior, a horribly abstract and unreasonable notion. So how to make peace with this dereliction of dogma?

I recently was very honored to be a guest at a gathering of fine gentlemen who exceed me in wit, style and by-God brains. These fellows were very fluent in the culture, history and depth of appreciation of fine pipes and tobaccos. The backgrounds of these men is quite varied and included bankers, artists, scientists, musicians, law enforcement officials and even a philosophy student. A common theme among us bound this socially disparate group tightly. Fine pipes. It bridged gaps of knowledge and personal experience, of age, and of social disposition. Never did the subject of affordability or relative value come up, only an appreciation of artistic and engineering excellence. I have found, in fact, that the common pipe, when carved with care and skill and placed into the hands of a true brother of the briar, is not only a piece of art but a bridge between men, a common thread so deeply embedded into our souls that it demands absolute friendship and respect from it’s admirers.

So this begs the question: Is the high grade pipe an excess or a necessary, albeit expensive, accoutrement to the soul of man.

I’m really hoping it’s the latter!

I’m quite sure I’ll get over this feeling of excess in my simple, tidy little life, but in the meantime, barring the revelation of an answer to the question I pose, I suppose I’ll just have to allow it as a much welcome chink in my psyche and keep saving my dollars for that next great briar.