The notion of choice also intrigued Namgay, since the limited number of items in any given shop in Thimphu precludes it. In a small shop in Thimphu you might find one tablecloth, one pair of underwear, and one pair of shoes that will fit you. Never mind that the shoes are a hideous green metallic: if the shoe fits, you must buy it— and wear it—even if it makes you look like a leprechaun.

If I had to name the biggest difference between Bhutan and the rest of the world, I could do it in one word, civility.

And it made me sad that in the U.S. we don’t mend things anymore. Mending and fixing broken things is deeply satisfying. More

I have never been someone who likes rules or structure. I don't even like ruled notebook paper. There's too much structure in the world: too much insurance, litigation, unfulfilling work, fighting; too many credit cards, receipts, forms, taxes, mortgages, traffic jams, obligations and always enormous pressure and fear as a result.

We didn’t have a vacuum or dishwasher. When I told my mother we didn’t have a washing machine, it made her cry. What I didn’t tell her was that we didn’t have a washing machine because half the time we didn’t have running water, and we had to haul our water from outside in buckets. Bhutan,

He was stunned that almost every room in the house had a basket for trash tucked discreetly somewhere, lined with a white plastic bag, which was changed at intervals. In Bhutan, the few plastic bags we have are washed and hung out to dry and reused. Some of them have been around for years. He’d take the trash out to the big bins in my parents’ garage every day. But then reality hit and his face went dark. “Where does all this trash go?” he asked me. “To the dump,” I said. I could see he was doing the math: “Half the country must be the dump.” In Bhutan, we compost our vegetable waste and put plastic and paper waste into an ordinary-sized plastic garbage bin in our storeroom. Once every two or three months, when the bin is full, we drive it up to the dump about 20 minutes from our house. In the winter we use it to start fires in our woodstove. That is not to say that more waste isn’t coming to Bhutan. But Bhutan, and the rest of the world for that matter, has a long way to go to catch up with the United States. While