How to live life within the confines of a container and find freedom in the process

is the bowl half full or empty?

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What do you do when you first enter a hotel room or a rental house?

I don’t know about you. I open shit up. Every single unlocked drawer, cabinet and closet. I take it upon myself to expose all the nooks and crannies like a tabloid magazine and its favorite member of the Royal family. If I’m going to sleep here, I need to know about the skeletons in the closet.

So when my friend and I checked into our Airbnb over the summer, the former home of artist Andrea Zittel, I went to work and opened everything. But because every inch of this home is a work of art, it was hard to focus, as we marveled at something cool and artsy in every corner, shelf, surface, and ceiling in this house.

Andrea’s art, much of it displayed in her home, was a testing ground for alternative ways of living.

For example, as a nod to sustainability, she made herself a personal uniform, a design she tweaked and perfected so she can wear one outfit per season. She claimed wearing the same thing everyday may help you find freedom.

She also detached from our modern idea of time. She ditched looking at calendars and clocks and created what she called “vertical accumulators” — a wall hook “holding years worth of dried tea bags… tracking time idiosyncratically.”

tea bags that tell time

As we pored through the guest manual of the Airbnb, we discovered she also experimented with eating and drinking out of bowls exclusively.

She called them A-Z Containers. She “began using containers in daily life in the early 1990s and they continue to serve as the sole dinnerware used at A-Z West.¹”

We scanned the kitchen’s brass shelving to the left of the main window, which held stacks of black ceramic bowls; a few tiny bowls perfect for a handful of M&Ms, medium sized bowls great for milk and cereal, and large ones that can house a hefty salad to share for a few. The adjacent shelves held larger sized ceramic bowls, ones I imagined would be great for a spaghetti and meatball dish for a family of 4.

Then we noticed what wasn’t in the kitchen.

pic from the airbnb listing

There was not a plate, a drinking glass, or a mug in sight. Again, I read the words in the laminated manual: these bowls “serve as the sole dinnerware…”

Hold up. WUT?!

Are we supposed to eat and drink only from these bowls?

Coffee… from a bowl? Soup, from the same bowl? We brought casserole and breakfast sandwiches, both of which I pictured on plates. I imagined us sipping our hot tea, with the string and tag hanging off the side of a cup. With a handle. What the heck, what about the handle?! Do we need both hands if we choose a larger bowl in which to drink?

*

My friend and I specifically chose this funky designed home for a writers retreat, to expand our minds, to think as artists, and to create without distraction from our normal lives back home.

What is art anyway? There’s no universal definition but thinking outside the box, or, in this case, a bowl, is a good place to start.

So Heather and I fully embraced our temporary new way of living. We drank coffee out of bowls. We ate our eggs with hot sauce in these bowls, washed them, and poured tea in it afterward.

We walked around, trying our hardest not to slosh the hot liquid onto our hands and onto the hypnotic tile flooring as we discussed book outlines and essay topics.

For two full days, we no longer needed cups or plates. We were bowl people. We chuckled each time we ate our food and drank in these receptacles. We were sort of loving it.

I didn’t see these bowls as a hindrance anymore. I loved to cup my meal in my hand, close to my face, and shovel casserole into my mouth. We wondered what it would be like if we exclusively used bowls at home and it seemed possible.

On the last night at the rental, just when we were getting a hang of these bowls, I stared at a couple of upper cabinets in the kitchen and opened them.

Can you guess what was inside?

Stacks of plates and rows of mugs and glasses. They were sitting there, fully accessible and ready to be used, in a cabinet I somehow missed and didn’t open.

I swear I opened all the things. Didn’t I?

We screamed. We laughed. We questioned why the hell we overlooked opening that one specific cabinet.

But I believe it’s exactly what was meant to happen in our little artist’s haven. The ghost of Andrea’s experimental art hovered over those cabinets and did not let me pry them open. It expanded our minds, it forced us to think differently, eat differently and, perhaps it helped our creativity.

As I reflect on our our getaway, I’m reminded of how I typically think like a pessimist. Not my favorite personality trait (isn’t that how a cynic thinks?!) But, alas, this is who I am. It’s a constant practice for me to think beyond my limitations.

Just because I tend to be pessimistic, I have the ability — or better yet, the freedom — to shift my way of thinking. Who says you can’t change your mind?

You heard me rattle off all the doubts I had about bowl life. But with the belief I had no other choice, I was given the opportunity to look at my situation differently. It made space for me to enjoy the new way of doing something as mundane as drinking.

In the beginning of our stay, I saw the bowl was half empty.

When we knew we had the option to use other dinnerware that night, we stuck with the bowls because, why not?! I’m glad we believed in the “limitation” of the bowls. What’s the saying? We don’t HAVE to drink the coffee out of the bowl, we GET to. And it’s been half-full this entire time.

Andrea’s art lets us examine the way we live in our own interpretations of a free society.

Andrea said in an interview with Financial Times: “My experiments question the definition of freedom as it is framed by capitalist society. Perhaps the only way to truly be free is to make our own rules.”

Let’s rewrite our rules. Let’s flex muscles of discomfort to give us access to new experiences, expand our perspectives on what is and what isn’t possible.

Which one are you? A half full or half empty kind of person? Or maybe you’re a bit like me lately. I can make my own rules through experiences, and look at life with both lenses.

mad dogging while sipping

1. The name of the Airbnb