“I bet you’ll be wearing shorts and flip-flops in no time after you arrive at Stanford”, my friend Cosana kidded last year, when I made a nasty comment on the Americans’ (and Californians’ in particular) preference for dressing down. “Wanna bet?”, I retorted, quite sure I wouldn’t be adopting the casual uniform of the Stanford student, y compris the loathed flip-flops, so easily. Well, it turns out Cosana’s prediction was not far from reality.

I arrived at Stanford 3 days ago with a backpack and a few gadgets. My suitcases decided to take a longer route and I haven’t heard from them (nor from KLM) ever since. I’ve decided to take this as an omen of a new life (it hapenned only 10 days after my 30th birthday) and tried to remain serene. I’d normally be fuming over this, but I’m kind of enjoying this stoic exercise – managing with only the basics of life.

The two suitcases, which I’ve now completely lost hope of getting back, contained most of my informal wardrobe. Jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, sunglasses. I’ve filled in an inventory today on the KLM website and was surprised at how well I remembered each item. Color, brand, material, where I’ve got it, how much I paid for it. At one point this whole memory exercise started feeling pretty trivial, as I realized that nobody but me could really understand how much I had fetishized my clothes. It was not the quality of the materials, neither the niche brands and not even the money, but the time spent to find each item and the patience it took to wait for “the right one” to appear, the one that would work well with all the others. I always said that mine was not an expensive wardrobe, but an intelligent one, with few items that allowed for innumerable combinations. I know, here I go again…

Fortunately the KLM form did not ask about the emotional value of my inventory. That would have really gotten me depressed. Instead it asked me to make a claim for the total loss. This brought me back to reality. I knew they have a ridiculous claim limit per passenger and I had no private insurance. I stopped adding items as I realized I had already reached that limit and even if they actually offered to reimburse the total value of my lost wardrobe, I would still be at loss as to where I could rebuild it from scratch in just a few weeks.

So I went back to the initial philosophy of not caring so much for a bunch of clothes. Now and then the memory of a particular sweater or T-shirt that I completely overlooked when filling in the form suddenly bursts and with it comes a feeling of regret. Then I remember my resolution and try to focus on this new and exciting journey that I’ve just embarked upon.

“That’s a great attitude!”, a sales associate told me at the department store where I was getting my fourth daily T-shirt, on hearing my explanation that the lost luggage is probably a sign of parting with the past (not that I have a regrettable past, I just like the way it sounds). I spared her the source of my newly found wisdom, but, for the sake of historical truth, it’s actually adapted from one of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius:

I am so firmly determined, however, to test the constancy of your mind that, drawing from the teachings of great men, I shall give you also a lesson:  Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. (…)  If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes. Such is the course which those men I have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month come almost to want, that they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed.

So here I am, in shorts, flip-flops and T-shirt, biking around Stanford with the smile of a newly religious convert on my face, training myself for the crisis to come. I’m not sure this is what the Stoic philosopher had in mind, but it’s as close as I can get to imitating poverty. It was Saint Paul who said that God “will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it”. So I guess I have to be thankful to KLM for providing the lift to sunny Palo Alto. I doubt I would have been able to keep my composure had this all happened in, say, rainy Manchester or gloomy Helsinki.