Happy Sunday! I hope you are having a terrific one.
Here is a brief list of how I incorporated voluntary simplicity into my life this week:
(1) Exercise. Voluntary simplicity involves focusing on people (not things). Too often we get so busy we neglect our health. That was a real struggle for me when I was still in the rat race. I've never been skinny, but early in my career I began to pack on pounds due to my insane hours at my desk. That continued for a number of years until I became a mom and I wanted to be healthier for my kids. I've been a fairly healthy eater throughout my adult years, but lack of exercise had been my pitfall. So, as a young mom, I joined the Y near my office and faithfully went to workout every work day at lunch time. Over time, I lost over 30 pounds. And I kept it off for several years. I also aspired to lose a bit more but was not able to. To do so, I really needed to up my exercise, but I just didn't have enough time for that. I barely had time for what I was doing. But then things changed, my professional demands intensified greatly. My ever more demanding work life meant I had little control over what I ate at times, and eventually I had to give up my dedicated exercise schedule. Despite having kept the weight off for several years, once my work demands forced me to give up regular exercise, it all came back--and surprisingly fast. How depressing! I realized that the only way to change the situation was to exercise regularly again, and I vowed that when I stepped down from my paid gig and had more control over my schedule, I would get back into the swing of it. That worked well initially this fall, but then we went on several family trips and Thanksgiving arrived. Basically, my schedule got crazy and my exercise schedule fell by the wayside. Earlier in the fall, I had re-lost some weight, but things stalled as my exercise waned. This week, however, I've renewed my resolve. I'm proud to report that I did not miss one day of exercise. There are so many benefits to exercise. It is not just about weight loss or weight control. When I exercise regularly, I am a happier person on so many levels. It really is not to be missed. So, I share this in the hopes that it will encourage anyone who struggles in this area. Particularly moms of young children, we find it difficult to find time to take care of our health. But I think the flight attendant advice is apt in many aspects of life--we need to put our own oxygen mask on before we attempt to put on the masks of our children. If we expire before we get anyone else's mask on, we're not helping anyone. It is not noble to sacrifice oneself in that manner. Taking care of ourselves means we're more likely to be here and be in a position to help others.
(2) Meditation. This week was the second time I made it to my church's weekly meditation session. This time, it was a "drumming meditation," which was something new for me. Frankly, this was not my cup of tea. All the pounding of the drums gave me a headache and stressed me out a bit. But it was great to try something new. The drums were pretty. And the second half of the session involved just a regular meditation, which was nice. It's always important to try new things. Even if it was not my favorite type of meditation, I learned a lot and was inspired by the people who attended.
(3) Advent. As a Christ-follower, I'm preparing for the celebration of Christmas. That celebration means different things to different people. After all, many non-religious people celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. To me, at this point in my faith journey, I think Christmas means reflecting on what it means to have Jesus in my life. Carrie Underwood bravely took on the iconic role of "Maria" in a live TV version of The Sound of Music recently. I don't follow her on social media, but I've heard that she responded to the barrage of vicious criticism of her performance by simply stating that there are a lot of people who need Jesus in their lives and she will be praying for them. I've been thinking about that response. To me, what she is saying rings true--a lot of people are worn down by the negativity of the world, the lack of hope, and the absence of love in their lives. They don't know any better than to attack others. To me, having Jesus in your heart means understanding that there is a better way to live--to have hope and love in your heart. If we keep Jesus in our hearts, then we will radiate his hope and love to others who need that encouragement and peace. This week, I've tried to be mindful of this. I've tried to reach out to others to encourage them in various ways. And I've thanked those who have done the same for me. Christmas is a time of light in the darkness of winter. I believe we're called to be light to one another.
Cheers! And have a lovely Sunday. If you celebrate Christmas in a religious sense, I also wish you a meaningful Advent!
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Transitions
In the last post I shared a link by a woman who homesteads. She was sharing advice that she wished someone had shared with her before she began homesteading. In life, having insight from those who've traveled the road ahead of us is so incredibly helpful. I keep thinking about this woman's post. I hope you are too. And I think there are a couple broader lessons to be learned here.
First, seek out and be open to advice from others. Knowing what they've learned in their journey will help you avoid some of the same pitfalls.
Second, be open to lessons learned even from people whose life experiences are very different from yours. I'm a suburban mom whose having trouble keeping alive the herbs in my kitchen window. I am not now--and probably will never be--a homesteader. My family and I would starve!
But at heart what this woman is writing about is transitions. What she writes about transitioning from an urban to a rural setting to homestead is actually very applicable to my life. I've been transitioning from a life in the rat race to focusing on my family. Like her grandiose expectations and goals when she began homesteading, I also dreamed big and had high hopes for my home and homeschooling. And like her experience homesteading, not all my dreams and hopes have materialized in the 4 months or so that I've been home.
Nonetheless, her advice that it doesn't have to happen overnight is helpful. I'm already beginning to see that some of my plans are more long term and have a longer germination period than I'd assumed. Being gentle on myself about that reality is important. And taking time to take stock and revel in the successes is important. Even though I haven't met all my goals for my home or my homeschooling, there has been a lot of progress already. And we're not done yet.
First, seek out and be open to advice from others. Knowing what they've learned in their journey will help you avoid some of the same pitfalls.
Second, be open to lessons learned even from people whose life experiences are very different from yours. I'm a suburban mom whose having trouble keeping alive the herbs in my kitchen window. I am not now--and probably will never be--a homesteader. My family and I would starve!
But at heart what this woman is writing about is transitions. What she writes about transitioning from an urban to a rural setting to homestead is actually very applicable to my life. I've been transitioning from a life in the rat race to focusing on my family. Like her grandiose expectations and goals when she began homesteading, I also dreamed big and had high hopes for my home and homeschooling. And like her experience homesteading, not all my dreams and hopes have materialized in the 4 months or so that I've been home.
Nonetheless, her advice that it doesn't have to happen overnight is helpful. I'm already beginning to see that some of my plans are more long term and have a longer germination period than I'd assumed. Being gentle on myself about that reality is important. And taking time to take stock and revel in the successes is important. Even though I haven't met all my goals for my home or my homeschooling, there has been a lot of progress already. And we're not done yet.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Simply Sunday #12
Happy Sunday!
I've got just a short list this week. More is not always more.
(1) Simple Date Night. Our kids had a sleepover this weekend, so my husband and I had a date night. We had had plans to go to a particular restaurant we'd wanted to try. But when we dropped our kids off, we visited for a long time with the hosting parents and started our date late. The restaurant was fairly far away. It is family owned, and we've been unsuccessful in the past because they aren't open as many hours and don't keep as predictable a schedule as an Olive Garden or Taco Bell. At that point in the evening, we weren't sure if we could get there before they'd close. So we went with the flow and just got a burger on the way home from the sleepover home. It was delicious! We don't eat a lot of meat, rarely eat beef or fried foods. So it was a real treat. Not fancy or anything. But yummy.
(2) Wisdom. I have always loved learning from life experiences--mine and those of other folks. Now that I'm in my 40s, I feel like I've learned so much. Though there is still so much more to learn, I'm so much wiser than I was earlier in my journey. I enjoy sharing the insights I've learned with folks who are receptive. And I love to hear the insights of folks who've lived a different lifestyle or who've lived a similar one but began their journey earlier than me. Along those lines, this morning, I came across a blog post that I found very helpful: http://gnowfglins.com/2013/10/14/rural-homesteading-four-things-i-wish-i-had-known. It is by a woman who is a former missionary turned rural homesteader. I am very drawn to both the lives of missionaries and homesteaders, though my husband rightfully laughs a bit at both interests because I'm not very hearty and I'm terribly squeamish about critters. At this point in my life, I'd never be able to live without certain modern urban comforts. Nonetheless, this particular homesteading blog post was really insightful to me. Though the writer lives such a different lifestyle from me, her words of wisdom are actually pretty transferrable to other ways of life. Much of what she advised are things I needed to hear about my life in the 'burbs as I maintain a home and educate my kids. We all get socialized to constant busyness and beat ourselves up if we aren't achieving everything on our to-do list. That is not healthy. That is not helpful. So, even if you aren't a homesteader, take a read of this blog post. It may speak to you even if you don't know a thing about growing your own food!
Make it a great day!
I've got just a short list this week. More is not always more.
(1) Simple Date Night. Our kids had a sleepover this weekend, so my husband and I had a date night. We had had plans to go to a particular restaurant we'd wanted to try. But when we dropped our kids off, we visited for a long time with the hosting parents and started our date late. The restaurant was fairly far away. It is family owned, and we've been unsuccessful in the past because they aren't open as many hours and don't keep as predictable a schedule as an Olive Garden or Taco Bell. At that point in the evening, we weren't sure if we could get there before they'd close. So we went with the flow and just got a burger on the way home from the sleepover home. It was delicious! We don't eat a lot of meat, rarely eat beef or fried foods. So it was a real treat. Not fancy or anything. But yummy.
(2) Wisdom. I have always loved learning from life experiences--mine and those of other folks. Now that I'm in my 40s, I feel like I've learned so much. Though there is still so much more to learn, I'm so much wiser than I was earlier in my journey. I enjoy sharing the insights I've learned with folks who are receptive. And I love to hear the insights of folks who've lived a different lifestyle or who've lived a similar one but began their journey earlier than me. Along those lines, this morning, I came across a blog post that I found very helpful: http://gnowfglins.com/2013/10/14/rural-homesteading-four-things-i-wish-i-had-known. It is by a woman who is a former missionary turned rural homesteader. I am very drawn to both the lives of missionaries and homesteaders, though my husband rightfully laughs a bit at both interests because I'm not very hearty and I'm terribly squeamish about critters. At this point in my life, I'd never be able to live without certain modern urban comforts. Nonetheless, this particular homesteading blog post was really insightful to me. Though the writer lives such a different lifestyle from me, her words of wisdom are actually pretty transferrable to other ways of life. Much of what she advised are things I needed to hear about my life in the 'burbs as I maintain a home and educate my kids. We all get socialized to constant busyness and beat ourselves up if we aren't achieving everything on our to-do list. That is not healthy. That is not helpful. So, even if you aren't a homesteader, take a read of this blog post. It may speak to you even if you don't know a thing about growing your own food!
Make it a great day!
Thursday, December 5, 2013
The Holiday Season
We are now in what is probably the most challenging time of year for those who crave or try to adhere to a simpler, less hectic, less consumerist way of life. At this time of year in particular, the dominant culture whips everyone up into a frenzy of materialism and overspending.
This makes my husband and I sad. For a number of reasons. People are chasing things that in the end won't make them happy for more than a brief period at most. Meanwhile, they are doing destructive things like spending more than they should, incurring debt and foregoing spending on things with longer lasting value (e.g., retirement accounts, kids' college savings account). And to us, as people of faith, it is particularly upsetting that all this is done in the name of Jesus. The Prince of Peace was born in an animal stable as a peasant. It makes no sense to us to remember his birth by spoiling our children and exceeding our credit card limits.
So, I have a couple of thoughts to share that I hope might be particularly apropos and helpful this time of year.
For those who are Christ followers, I encourage you to re-focus on why we celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas, Christmas and Epiphany. The Advent Conspiracy movement is working hard to help us do that. Their website is: http://www.adventconspiracy.org/. It helps us to avoid the secular trappings of the season to celebrate in a manner that is more in line with our faith.
Another resource you might consider is the 2007 film What Would Jesus Buy? It was produced by Morgan Spurlock, a West Virginia filmmaker who came to prominence with the documentary Super Size Me. What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd film. It follows a band of (what I take to be) performance artists who assume the persona of a flamboyant preacher and his choir who travel the country in the days before Christmas preaching the gospel of the anti-materialism as the "Church of Stop Shopping." At times, What Would Jesus Buy? was someone offensive to me because they caricature my religion (or at least aspects of it) and seem to denigrate the sacred (like baptism). But I always try to keep an open mind and there were definitely parts of the film that were very engaging, and thought-provoking. I particularly found insightful the people interviewed about their attitudes towards Christmas. It made me very sad to hear so many express that the holiday was only about buying a lot of stuff. That alone I find spiritually vacuous, but what I found even more tragic was the attitudes of parents who expressed that they needed to move heaven and earth, do whatever was necessary to give their kids lots of stuff to open on Christmas Day. I don't even know how to express my profound sadness over such cultural perversion over a beautiful holiday with a very different meaning at its core.
In my opinion, the Advent Conspiracy and questioning our perversion of Christmas is much more fruitful that the effort by Focus on the Family and others to get retailers to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" instead of the more inclusive "Happy Holidays." I hold the birth of my Savior as sacred, and find it patently offensive when retailers exploit it to make money. As a Christian, I much prefer the broader term "holidays" to the more explicit exploitation of the birth of Jesus.
Here is something else. To some of you, this will seem really radical, but my husband and I have also never indoctrinated our children into the modern Santa Claus myth. We believe in being honest and don't want to ever give them reason to not trust us. We also don't want them to believe in magical fairies who dump lots of toys on well-behaved kids from affluent families but somehow don't stop at the homes of well-behaved kids from families with less income. And as people of faith, we don't want a mythical elf to compete in any way with Jesus Christ.
If you think this is an extreme approach to the Santa myth, I encourage you watch a wonderful, insightful documentary from A&E's Biography series on Santa Claus. It was first aired in 2005. The episode traces the roots of the Santa myth as a tool for modern retailers to the modern Hollywood deification of the character. As you watch the episode, you will begin to realize the term "deification" is not an exaggeration. One aspect of the episode that particularly got my attention was when one Hollywood interviewee described the modern concept of Santa Claus as like God for grown ups. Wow.
Even if you are not a Christian or if you are not a person of any faith, this time of year is still hectic and stressful. There are social customs in our country that make it quite a challenge to avoid over-spending. For years when we were younger, my husband and I felt the need to buy presents for so many people in our lives. As if there was some shame in not giving someone junk they didn't need and probably didn't want.
For years, I also didn't question all the stuff I was gifted. That was part of life. But after a while, I began to realize what a burden it was. I felt obligated to make room for stuff, even if I didn't like it. Someone had given it to me, it would be ungrateful to throw it out or give it away. My home became cluttered with stuff like that. I began to think of all the money we spend giving each other such gifts. And all the time we waste trying to figure out what to do with it when we receive it and the emotional energy we use feeling guilty that we really want to throw it out.
So, now our family gives few presents. We give presents to our kids--more on that in a minute. But few to adults or anyone outside our family. We agree with the notion of showing appreciation for all the nice folks who make our lives better throughout the year, but now we only give gifts that can be consumed. We enjoy baking once a year and we share that bounty with people whom we appreciate and want to thank. They can eat it or share it with someone else, but it is not going to take room on their shelves gathering dust until they get the gumption to throw it out. And if I say so myself, our baking is pretty good, so it is a treat to receive our cookies and muffins.
It is difficult for all of us this time of year, but it is particularly difficult for parents, in large part to the cultural perpetuation of the Santa myth and the efforts of retailers. Even though we homeschool and don't watch much TV, even our kids are not immune from the frenzy of Christmas and the cultural expectation that the holiday is for receiving gifts. So as a parent, it is a tough situation to deal with. We do our best.
We try to talk to our kids throughout the season to remind them why we celebrate Christmas, to remind them that Santa Claus is a myth invented by retailers to sell more stuff, and to just enjoy each other's company. We give some gifts to the kids, but we try to not give many. We don't want that to be the main focus of the day. We try to do gifts at other times so as to not confuse our children about why we celebrate Christmas. Instead, we have a birthday party for Jesus. We cook together to have a special meal or two. We also make a special cake, which our kids like to decorate. We put a ton of candles on it because Jesus was born about 2000 years ago. We sing "Happy Birthday" to him and enjoy his cake. We play games. We take a walk at night to see the Christmas lights in the neighborhood. We drink hot cocoa to warm us up. We watch a fun Christmas movie at the end of the celebrations. It is an absolutely fun day. We don't just open a lot of presents, then spend the day apart with those presents. We spend the day together, which is a lot more meaningful.
One last thought I want to share with you about the season's frenzy of gift giving. Even if you aren't swayed by the harm done to our wallets or the perversion of a sacred religious holiday or the space/time/effort wasted on buying things people don't want, there is another reason why buying a lot of presents may not be the way to go.
In our modern culture, we've demanded access to a plethora of cheap consumer goods. These types of goods make up the bulk of holiday gift-giving. What we in the West don't often stop to consider is the high cost of making these cheap goods available for easy purchase. We may see the "made in China" or "made in Bangladesh" mark on the goods, but in our hectic lives, we may give that no thought. We should.
Workers in developing nations are leading lives of misery to make those goods for our markets. Some are so miserable in their dehumanizing work environments that they take their own lives: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/china.foxconn.inside.factory/.
Many are forced to work poverty wages in unsafe conditions. Some are modern day slaves, but others nominally agree to such conditions due to desperation in economies with few other options. Many are children.
I encourage you--with some trepidation--to look at the link below. It contains a heart-wrenching photo and article about the collapse in April of this year of a factory in Bangladesh. 1129 human beings died in that tragedy, and 2515 other human beings were injured. Some of us heard of the tragedy, but may have paid it little mind because of our busy lives and our feeling that we are powerless to help. Others may be unfamiliar with the story. Either way, I encourage you to consider the article and the photo. I encourage you to consider the human toll of the low prices for consumer goods we demand in our culture. The electronics, the clothes, the toys. Beyond what the frenzy does to our own finances and our souls, what about the people who produce these goods at the exploitively low prices we demand?
http://iacknowledge.net/the-most-powerful-image-youll-see-today/
This makes my husband and I sad. For a number of reasons. People are chasing things that in the end won't make them happy for more than a brief period at most. Meanwhile, they are doing destructive things like spending more than they should, incurring debt and foregoing spending on things with longer lasting value (e.g., retirement accounts, kids' college savings account). And to us, as people of faith, it is particularly upsetting that all this is done in the name of Jesus. The Prince of Peace was born in an animal stable as a peasant. It makes no sense to us to remember his birth by spoiling our children and exceeding our credit card limits.
So, I have a couple of thoughts to share that I hope might be particularly apropos and helpful this time of year.
For those who are Christ followers, I encourage you to re-focus on why we celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas, Christmas and Epiphany. The Advent Conspiracy movement is working hard to help us do that. Their website is: http://www.adventconspiracy.org/. It helps us to avoid the secular trappings of the season to celebrate in a manner that is more in line with our faith.
Another resource you might consider is the 2007 film What Would Jesus Buy? It was produced by Morgan Spurlock, a West Virginia filmmaker who came to prominence with the documentary Super Size Me. What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd film. It follows a band of (what I take to be) performance artists who assume the persona of a flamboyant preacher and his choir who travel the country in the days before Christmas preaching the gospel of the anti-materialism as the "Church of Stop Shopping." At times, What Would Jesus Buy? was someone offensive to me because they caricature my religion (or at least aspects of it) and seem to denigrate the sacred (like baptism). But I always try to keep an open mind and there were definitely parts of the film that were very engaging, and thought-provoking. I particularly found insightful the people interviewed about their attitudes towards Christmas. It made me very sad to hear so many express that the holiday was only about buying a lot of stuff. That alone I find spiritually vacuous, but what I found even more tragic was the attitudes of parents who expressed that they needed to move heaven and earth, do whatever was necessary to give their kids lots of stuff to open on Christmas Day. I don't even know how to express my profound sadness over such cultural perversion over a beautiful holiday with a very different meaning at its core.
In my opinion, the Advent Conspiracy and questioning our perversion of Christmas is much more fruitful that the effort by Focus on the Family and others to get retailers to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" instead of the more inclusive "Happy Holidays." I hold the birth of my Savior as sacred, and find it patently offensive when retailers exploit it to make money. As a Christian, I much prefer the broader term "holidays" to the more explicit exploitation of the birth of Jesus.
Here is something else. To some of you, this will seem really radical, but my husband and I have also never indoctrinated our children into the modern Santa Claus myth. We believe in being honest and don't want to ever give them reason to not trust us. We also don't want them to believe in magical fairies who dump lots of toys on well-behaved kids from affluent families but somehow don't stop at the homes of well-behaved kids from families with less income. And as people of faith, we don't want a mythical elf to compete in any way with Jesus Christ.
If you think this is an extreme approach to the Santa myth, I encourage you watch a wonderful, insightful documentary from A&E's Biography series on Santa Claus. It was first aired in 2005. The episode traces the roots of the Santa myth as a tool for modern retailers to the modern Hollywood deification of the character. As you watch the episode, you will begin to realize the term "deification" is not an exaggeration. One aspect of the episode that particularly got my attention was when one Hollywood interviewee described the modern concept of Santa Claus as like God for grown ups. Wow.
Even if you are not a Christian or if you are not a person of any faith, this time of year is still hectic and stressful. There are social customs in our country that make it quite a challenge to avoid over-spending. For years when we were younger, my husband and I felt the need to buy presents for so many people in our lives. As if there was some shame in not giving someone junk they didn't need and probably didn't want.
For years, I also didn't question all the stuff I was gifted. That was part of life. But after a while, I began to realize what a burden it was. I felt obligated to make room for stuff, even if I didn't like it. Someone had given it to me, it would be ungrateful to throw it out or give it away. My home became cluttered with stuff like that. I began to think of all the money we spend giving each other such gifts. And all the time we waste trying to figure out what to do with it when we receive it and the emotional energy we use feeling guilty that we really want to throw it out.
So, now our family gives few presents. We give presents to our kids--more on that in a minute. But few to adults or anyone outside our family. We agree with the notion of showing appreciation for all the nice folks who make our lives better throughout the year, but now we only give gifts that can be consumed. We enjoy baking once a year and we share that bounty with people whom we appreciate and want to thank. They can eat it or share it with someone else, but it is not going to take room on their shelves gathering dust until they get the gumption to throw it out. And if I say so myself, our baking is pretty good, so it is a treat to receive our cookies and muffins.
It is difficult for all of us this time of year, but it is particularly difficult for parents, in large part to the cultural perpetuation of the Santa myth and the efforts of retailers. Even though we homeschool and don't watch much TV, even our kids are not immune from the frenzy of Christmas and the cultural expectation that the holiday is for receiving gifts. So as a parent, it is a tough situation to deal with. We do our best.
We try to talk to our kids throughout the season to remind them why we celebrate Christmas, to remind them that Santa Claus is a myth invented by retailers to sell more stuff, and to just enjoy each other's company. We give some gifts to the kids, but we try to not give many. We don't want that to be the main focus of the day. We try to do gifts at other times so as to not confuse our children about why we celebrate Christmas. Instead, we have a birthday party for Jesus. We cook together to have a special meal or two. We also make a special cake, which our kids like to decorate. We put a ton of candles on it because Jesus was born about 2000 years ago. We sing "Happy Birthday" to him and enjoy his cake. We play games. We take a walk at night to see the Christmas lights in the neighborhood. We drink hot cocoa to warm us up. We watch a fun Christmas movie at the end of the celebrations. It is an absolutely fun day. We don't just open a lot of presents, then spend the day apart with those presents. We spend the day together, which is a lot more meaningful.
One last thought I want to share with you about the season's frenzy of gift giving. Even if you aren't swayed by the harm done to our wallets or the perversion of a sacred religious holiday or the space/time/effort wasted on buying things people don't want, there is another reason why buying a lot of presents may not be the way to go.
In our modern culture, we've demanded access to a plethora of cheap consumer goods. These types of goods make up the bulk of holiday gift-giving. What we in the West don't often stop to consider is the high cost of making these cheap goods available for easy purchase. We may see the "made in China" or "made in Bangladesh" mark on the goods, but in our hectic lives, we may give that no thought. We should.
Workers in developing nations are leading lives of misery to make those goods for our markets. Some are so miserable in their dehumanizing work environments that they take their own lives: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/china.foxconn.inside.factory/.
Many are forced to work poverty wages in unsafe conditions. Some are modern day slaves, but others nominally agree to such conditions due to desperation in economies with few other options. Many are children.
I encourage you--with some trepidation--to look at the link below. It contains a heart-wrenching photo and article about the collapse in April of this year of a factory in Bangladesh. 1129 human beings died in that tragedy, and 2515 other human beings were injured. Some of us heard of the tragedy, but may have paid it little mind because of our busy lives and our feeling that we are powerless to help. Others may be unfamiliar with the story. Either way, I encourage you to consider the article and the photo. I encourage you to consider the human toll of the low prices for consumer goods we demand in our culture. The electronics, the clothes, the toys. Beyond what the frenzy does to our own finances and our souls, what about the people who produce these goods at the exploitively low prices we demand?
http://iacknowledge.net/the-most-powerful-image-youll-see-today/
Monday, December 2, 2013
Post-Thanksgiving Thoughts
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was terrific. Probably one of the best I've ever had. I've reflected on why it was so good and I've come up with a couple reasons. Perhaps these points might be helpful to others gearing up for Christmas celebrations in a couple weeks.
(1) Limited Guest List. I take an inclusive view when it comes to celebrating. The more the merrier. I'd hate for anyone to not have someone to celebrate with. Gather everyone under one tent. No problem. Well, I still take an inclusive view, but thank goodness we ended up with just our immediate family plus two guests this year. When we've had multiple families sharing a holiday with us, just coordinating arrivals and departures to figure out meal times was a challenge. But with just the six of us, we enjoyed our guests without feeling overwhelmed at extreme entertaining.
(2) Scaled Back Menu. In the past, I felt obliged to have a ton of traditional dishes that cover the table such that my family and guests barely fit. It was chaotic trying to figure out how to cook everything in a single oven while the turkey took up all the space. I had to cook some things in advance then rewarm them at the last minute. Or cook things once the turkey was done and hope it didn't cool too much while we waited. I only made four dishes for this Thanksgiving. Very manageable. One I made completely in advance. And parts of another dish were cooked the day before, just had to be assembled the day of the feast.
(3) Scaled Back Entrée. One of my kids spilled the beans a couple years back that she and her father confessed to one another they didn't like turkey but didn't want to tell the rest of the family to avoid ruining our Thanksgiving. I was very annoyed. First, I don't believe in family secrets, even on mundane points. Second, I hate turkey too and kept making it for them! So, now the secret is out, we are liberated from having a traditional entrée that none of us wants. And frankly we don't eat a lot of meat. Part of our voluntary simplicity ethos! So we didn't just want to replace a big bird with another big hunk of meat. Instead, I decided to make enchiladas for the entrée, which we love and don't have very often. Yum-o! A real treat and so much easier, quicker to make. I didn't wake up early, but the big meal was ready way before noon. And to keep things semi-traditional, the other three dishes I made were pretty traditional so it felt like Thanksgiving and not just a nice dinner party.
(4) Potluck. I am no Martha Stewart, so I learned long ago to ask for help when entertaining. But if the guest list is unwieldy, even potluck becomes a logistical nightmare. One Christmas, I had a house full of hungry guests who had all brought side dishes, but the relative who was bringing the entrée ran late--very late. Some relatives had to start leaving before we had a complete meal to serve! But with two guests only, it was very manageable. I asked one to bring something for us to munch on while we were waiting for the meal, along with a salad. She bought several types of olives, which we put in a fancy dish. And she brought a salad kit that was fine. The other person brought dessert. He had made a trifle in advance, just had to assemble it when the time was right. My kids got to help, which they thoroughly enjoyed.
What a fun day! I didn't spend all day cooking. We had time to enjoy each other's company. We played board games and talked. And we had a real feast, but with a limited number of dishes, it wasn't overwhelming. We could take time to enjoy each dish. In the past, we've had so many dishes, you can't eat them all or if you do, you get just a taste because there is too much.
Happy holidays!
(1) Limited Guest List. I take an inclusive view when it comes to celebrating. The more the merrier. I'd hate for anyone to not have someone to celebrate with. Gather everyone under one tent. No problem. Well, I still take an inclusive view, but thank goodness we ended up with just our immediate family plus two guests this year. When we've had multiple families sharing a holiday with us, just coordinating arrivals and departures to figure out meal times was a challenge. But with just the six of us, we enjoyed our guests without feeling overwhelmed at extreme entertaining.
(2) Scaled Back Menu. In the past, I felt obliged to have a ton of traditional dishes that cover the table such that my family and guests barely fit. It was chaotic trying to figure out how to cook everything in a single oven while the turkey took up all the space. I had to cook some things in advance then rewarm them at the last minute. Or cook things once the turkey was done and hope it didn't cool too much while we waited. I only made four dishes for this Thanksgiving. Very manageable. One I made completely in advance. And parts of another dish were cooked the day before, just had to be assembled the day of the feast.
(3) Scaled Back Entrée. One of my kids spilled the beans a couple years back that she and her father confessed to one another they didn't like turkey but didn't want to tell the rest of the family to avoid ruining our Thanksgiving. I was very annoyed. First, I don't believe in family secrets, even on mundane points. Second, I hate turkey too and kept making it for them! So, now the secret is out, we are liberated from having a traditional entrée that none of us wants. And frankly we don't eat a lot of meat. Part of our voluntary simplicity ethos! So we didn't just want to replace a big bird with another big hunk of meat. Instead, I decided to make enchiladas for the entrée, which we love and don't have very often. Yum-o! A real treat and so much easier, quicker to make. I didn't wake up early, but the big meal was ready way before noon. And to keep things semi-traditional, the other three dishes I made were pretty traditional so it felt like Thanksgiving and not just a nice dinner party.
(4) Potluck. I am no Martha Stewart, so I learned long ago to ask for help when entertaining. But if the guest list is unwieldy, even potluck becomes a logistical nightmare. One Christmas, I had a house full of hungry guests who had all brought side dishes, but the relative who was bringing the entrée ran late--very late. Some relatives had to start leaving before we had a complete meal to serve! But with two guests only, it was very manageable. I asked one to bring something for us to munch on while we were waiting for the meal, along with a salad. She bought several types of olives, which we put in a fancy dish. And she brought a salad kit that was fine. The other person brought dessert. He had made a trifle in advance, just had to assemble it when the time was right. My kids got to help, which they thoroughly enjoyed.
What a fun day! I didn't spend all day cooking. We had time to enjoy each other's company. We played board games and talked. And we had a real feast, but with a limited number of dishes, it wasn't overwhelming. We could take time to enjoy each dish. In the past, we've had so many dishes, you can't eat them all or if you do, you get just a taste because there is too much.
Happy holidays!
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Thanksgiving
OK, we're within 48 hours of the big day.
Thanksgiving is a fabulous holiday. The point is to give thanks to one's deity for the blessings in our lives. And it is a secular holiday, so even if you believe in no deity, you can still take time out to be mindful of your good fortune. Modern medicine has proven that such mindfulness contributes to a range of physical and mental health benefits.
Beyond giving thanks for blessings, a secondary point to Thanksgiving is to gather together with others. We spend time with family and/or friends. It is considered less than ideal to spend the holiday alone. In my adult life, when I've known folks who would be alone on the holiday, I always invite them to join my family. They are always glad to get the invite. It would be depressing to spend Thanksgiving by oneself.
Note that both giving thanks (or mindfulness) and spending times with loved ones are quintessentially part of the ethos of voluntary simplicity. So in some ways, for those who embrace a simpler life, Thanksgiving is our most important holiday. What could be better than gathering together with people you love (or hopefully at least like) to eat some yummy food and spend some quality time.
But in my lifetime, I've seen Thanksgiving become less and less recognizable.
First, it degenerated to a day when people sit in front of the TV watching football all day, maybe while munching on a turkey drumstick. Despite being native Texans, our family watches only one football game a year--typically the Super Bowl. And frankly even then, we're only in it for the nachos. To me, if you are staring at a TV screen all day and screaming for some gladiator to mercilessly tackle another, you have overlooked the point of Thanksgiving.
And there have always been issues about going overboard with the feast. Some women (and occasionally men) who are responsible for preparing the feast for their families feel tremendous stress to provide a dining experience that Martha Stewart with her team of staff could produce. I know women who get up in the middle of the night and are virtually slaves of their own kitchen on Thanksgiving while everyone else is elsewhere having fun. They fret for weeks over concocting the right menu. Then they don't get to enjoy the day because they are trying to produce a dizzying array of dishes in a finite timeframe. They are worried about being judged or not adequately impressing their guests. Again, that misses the point of Thanksgiving.
But by far, the worst perversion of Thanksgiving has come in recent years with the encroachment of the commercial exploitation of Christmas. I am a Christian of over a quarter century, so I can tell you with some authority that no where in either the Hebrew Scripture or the New Testament is there even a suggestion that one must stand in line to buy a Play Station or plasma screen TV in order to properly celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.
It always made me sad that after the simple calm and gratitude of Thanksgiving, people would head out the very next day to spend hours in stores. It seemed like a cruel irony. We spend time giving thanks, then we run around like maniacs trying to accumulate more and more because apparently what we just gave thanks for was insufficient.
However, things got worse over time. At least initially Black Friday started at a normal time. We could enjoy our Thanksgiving and recover a bit Thursday night and Friday morning. But then retailers began to open their doors earlier and earlier Friday morning. I began to know people who would plan their Thanksgiving around that. They had to finish Thanksgiving at an earlier hour, so they could go to bed early to wake up early to get to the stores. How perverse!
But then a few years ago, the unthinkable began to happen. Some retailers began to open for a few hours on Thursday evening to get a jump start on Friday shopping. I wasn't even aware of this until a friend of mine explained that she and a friend were combining their families' Thanksgiving celebration so they could finish early and hit the special Thursday sale while the husbands watched football. This is a dear friend of mine. Her plans just depressed me more than I can say.
Meanwhile, the deals have gotten more and more attractive--luring more and more customers in either on Thursday or at crazy early hours on Friday morning. The term "door buster" was coined with sad irony because people desperate to get limited deals on waffle irons and computers trampled other human beings in the process.
And that is after many camp for days, sometimes as much as a week, outside a store to get such deals. Think about that. Where does one go to the bathroom? It is cold at night outside, even in the Sunbelt. Forcibly, one has totally foregone any feigned attempt to celebrate Thanksgiving if one spent it in a tent outside a Best Buy. Even if it is the biggest TV or snazziest iPad or gaming device, is it really worth days of your life when you might be doing other things? What a deeply sad state of affairs.
On social media, I've seen people decry the deterioration of Thanksgiving in this way. So I know I'm not the last person in America to feel this way, though it sometimes feels like it. Many such persons vilify the retailers for offering such deals at such times. There is some validity to that finger wagging. But others rightfully point out that the retailers are simply meeting a demand. It is the consuming public that is to blame for this state of affairs.
Personally, I think there is some truth to both sides. We see a similar situation in the disastrous war on drugs in this country. We vilify the parasitic, often violent drug dealers. They are to blame and if we just round them all up, the problem would go away. Only it doesn't work that way because our nation has such a huge demand for narcotics that others rise up to fill that demand. I would never defend drug dealers. I think they are exploitive and greedy, doing unconscionable harm. But it is too easy to just blame the dealers when the demand is apparently so great. We need to look at our own contribution to the situation in creating the demand the dealers meet.
Very similar dynamic with regard to retail sales at Thanksgiving. I do hold responsible the stores that offer these crazy door busters at insane times. But even if Walmart and Target refrained, other stores would spring up to fill the void because a lot of otherwise sane folks are willing to sacrifice Thanksgiving for cheap consumer goods. Shame on us all.
But I invite you to be different, to take the path less traveled so to speak. I encourage you to focus on the true meaning of Thanksgiving--to create a simple and enjoyable meal so you can spend the day just relaxing and enjoying the company of your friends and/or family.
Moreover, I encourage you to not be a part of this modern cultural madness. My husband and I are frugal and try to be good stewards of our finances. We buy things when they are on sale whenever possible. But I'm not even looking at any of the ads for this week and no one in our family is going shopping Thursday or Friday.
I know others take similar pledges. On social media, I saw one young man dismiss all the handwringing about the perversion of Thanksgiving by pointing out that if we abstain from all the consumption, we are not impacted in the least by the madness of Black Friday spilling over onto Thanksgiving. I was struck by what an insensitive, privileged statement this was. Based on the context of this statement, I glean that this man was well-educated and had a good job that did not require him to work on Thanksgiving. Not everyone has those advantages.
I know several people who work at grocery stores who have to work all day on Thursday. And it has nothing to do with door busters. Their corporate bosses decided it was important to stay open for all the folks on Thursday who begin to make the mashed potatoes but run out of butter or who realize they didn't buy enough sparkling apple juice for everyone who will be at their table. Don't forget the folks working this other end of retail sales at grocery stores. If you pledge to abstain from shopping during Thanksgiving, make sure you don't breach that pledge by running to the Ralph's or Piggly Wiggly for last minute groceries. Plan ahead, make sure you have what you need for all your recipes, and find work-arounds on Thursday if you don't.
In closing, I just encourage you to do your part to take back Thanksgiving from the retail madness and restore it to its original, beautiful purpose. Take time to appreciate your life and the people in it. Enjoy!
Thanksgiving is a fabulous holiday. The point is to give thanks to one's deity for the blessings in our lives. And it is a secular holiday, so even if you believe in no deity, you can still take time out to be mindful of your good fortune. Modern medicine has proven that such mindfulness contributes to a range of physical and mental health benefits.
Beyond giving thanks for blessings, a secondary point to Thanksgiving is to gather together with others. We spend time with family and/or friends. It is considered less than ideal to spend the holiday alone. In my adult life, when I've known folks who would be alone on the holiday, I always invite them to join my family. They are always glad to get the invite. It would be depressing to spend Thanksgiving by oneself.
Note that both giving thanks (or mindfulness) and spending times with loved ones are quintessentially part of the ethos of voluntary simplicity. So in some ways, for those who embrace a simpler life, Thanksgiving is our most important holiday. What could be better than gathering together with people you love (or hopefully at least like) to eat some yummy food and spend some quality time.
But in my lifetime, I've seen Thanksgiving become less and less recognizable.
First, it degenerated to a day when people sit in front of the TV watching football all day, maybe while munching on a turkey drumstick. Despite being native Texans, our family watches only one football game a year--typically the Super Bowl. And frankly even then, we're only in it for the nachos. To me, if you are staring at a TV screen all day and screaming for some gladiator to mercilessly tackle another, you have overlooked the point of Thanksgiving.
And there have always been issues about going overboard with the feast. Some women (and occasionally men) who are responsible for preparing the feast for their families feel tremendous stress to provide a dining experience that Martha Stewart with her team of staff could produce. I know women who get up in the middle of the night and are virtually slaves of their own kitchen on Thanksgiving while everyone else is elsewhere having fun. They fret for weeks over concocting the right menu. Then they don't get to enjoy the day because they are trying to produce a dizzying array of dishes in a finite timeframe. They are worried about being judged or not adequately impressing their guests. Again, that misses the point of Thanksgiving.
But by far, the worst perversion of Thanksgiving has come in recent years with the encroachment of the commercial exploitation of Christmas. I am a Christian of over a quarter century, so I can tell you with some authority that no where in either the Hebrew Scripture or the New Testament is there even a suggestion that one must stand in line to buy a Play Station or plasma screen TV in order to properly celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.
It always made me sad that after the simple calm and gratitude of Thanksgiving, people would head out the very next day to spend hours in stores. It seemed like a cruel irony. We spend time giving thanks, then we run around like maniacs trying to accumulate more and more because apparently what we just gave thanks for was insufficient.
However, things got worse over time. At least initially Black Friday started at a normal time. We could enjoy our Thanksgiving and recover a bit Thursday night and Friday morning. But then retailers began to open their doors earlier and earlier Friday morning. I began to know people who would plan their Thanksgiving around that. They had to finish Thanksgiving at an earlier hour, so they could go to bed early to wake up early to get to the stores. How perverse!
But then a few years ago, the unthinkable began to happen. Some retailers began to open for a few hours on Thursday evening to get a jump start on Friday shopping. I wasn't even aware of this until a friend of mine explained that she and a friend were combining their families' Thanksgiving celebration so they could finish early and hit the special Thursday sale while the husbands watched football. This is a dear friend of mine. Her plans just depressed me more than I can say.
Meanwhile, the deals have gotten more and more attractive--luring more and more customers in either on Thursday or at crazy early hours on Friday morning. The term "door buster" was coined with sad irony because people desperate to get limited deals on waffle irons and computers trampled other human beings in the process.
And that is after many camp for days, sometimes as much as a week, outside a store to get such deals. Think about that. Where does one go to the bathroom? It is cold at night outside, even in the Sunbelt. Forcibly, one has totally foregone any feigned attempt to celebrate Thanksgiving if one spent it in a tent outside a Best Buy. Even if it is the biggest TV or snazziest iPad or gaming device, is it really worth days of your life when you might be doing other things? What a deeply sad state of affairs.
On social media, I've seen people decry the deterioration of Thanksgiving in this way. So I know I'm not the last person in America to feel this way, though it sometimes feels like it. Many such persons vilify the retailers for offering such deals at such times. There is some validity to that finger wagging. But others rightfully point out that the retailers are simply meeting a demand. It is the consuming public that is to blame for this state of affairs.
Personally, I think there is some truth to both sides. We see a similar situation in the disastrous war on drugs in this country. We vilify the parasitic, often violent drug dealers. They are to blame and if we just round them all up, the problem would go away. Only it doesn't work that way because our nation has such a huge demand for narcotics that others rise up to fill that demand. I would never defend drug dealers. I think they are exploitive and greedy, doing unconscionable harm. But it is too easy to just blame the dealers when the demand is apparently so great. We need to look at our own contribution to the situation in creating the demand the dealers meet.
Very similar dynamic with regard to retail sales at Thanksgiving. I do hold responsible the stores that offer these crazy door busters at insane times. But even if Walmart and Target refrained, other stores would spring up to fill the void because a lot of otherwise sane folks are willing to sacrifice Thanksgiving for cheap consumer goods. Shame on us all.
But I invite you to be different, to take the path less traveled so to speak. I encourage you to focus on the true meaning of Thanksgiving--to create a simple and enjoyable meal so you can spend the day just relaxing and enjoying the company of your friends and/or family.
Moreover, I encourage you to not be a part of this modern cultural madness. My husband and I are frugal and try to be good stewards of our finances. We buy things when they are on sale whenever possible. But I'm not even looking at any of the ads for this week and no one in our family is going shopping Thursday or Friday.
I know others take similar pledges. On social media, I saw one young man dismiss all the handwringing about the perversion of Thanksgiving by pointing out that if we abstain from all the consumption, we are not impacted in the least by the madness of Black Friday spilling over onto Thanksgiving. I was struck by what an insensitive, privileged statement this was. Based on the context of this statement, I glean that this man was well-educated and had a good job that did not require him to work on Thanksgiving. Not everyone has those advantages.
I know several people who work at grocery stores who have to work all day on Thursday. And it has nothing to do with door busters. Their corporate bosses decided it was important to stay open for all the folks on Thursday who begin to make the mashed potatoes but run out of butter or who realize they didn't buy enough sparkling apple juice for everyone who will be at their table. Don't forget the folks working this other end of retail sales at grocery stores. If you pledge to abstain from shopping during Thanksgiving, make sure you don't breach that pledge by running to the Ralph's or Piggly Wiggly for last minute groceries. Plan ahead, make sure you have what you need for all your recipes, and find work-arounds on Thursday if you don't.
In closing, I just encourage you to do your part to take back Thanksgiving from the retail madness and restore it to its original, beautiful purpose. Take time to appreciate your life and the people in it. Enjoy!
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Simply Sunday #11
So this week, I don't think I did all that much to simplify my life. But the point of voluntary simplicity is not simplifying for simplicity's sake. It is to simplify so that you are spending your finite hours doing things that are worthy of your time, not wasting your life on pointless pursuits. I have done several things that are in line with an attempt to get more out of life. Here are a couple things I did (or didn't do) this week that are in line with this ethos:
(1) I'm appreciating my belongings. I have been cleaning out my house slowly this fall. Trying to get rid of things that I don't use or need. I've given a lot to thrift stores. And cleaning out helps me to see what I own. I've realized some things I was holding on to are just broken and need to be thrown out. And some things I'm rediscovering with gladness. I recently realized my 17 year old tea kettle needed replacement. I did that last week and I've been enjoying tea again. I've even learned out to make chai latte, which is a fun way to start my day. Several of the items in this list flow from this new found pleasure in tea drinking.
(2) I had some herb tea one afternoon. I always start my day with some tea for the caffeine. But that is all I have. I'm too sensitive to caffeine to have more than that. And I'm always running around, too busy to have tea without caffeine. The other day, however, I made time to make myself a little pot of herb tea and enjoyed it throughout the afternoon. What a lovely little luxury!
(3) I rearranged my teas. So, I wasn't even drinking tea much, but I had quite a collection. I've been slowing working my way through it this fall. But particularly as I have been drinking more tea this week, I've found that the little containers I used to organize different types were chaotic. So, I took a few minutes (while waiting for water to boil!) to organize my stash. Now I can find non-caffeinated teas quickly if I get a moment to enjoy some.
(4) I have been focusing more on relationships. I haven't gotten as much done in terms of de-cluttering our home this week, but that is ok. I'm focusing more time on relationship. I am blessed to have a lot of wonderful folks in my life, but that takes time to make time for us to spend together. A good chunk of my free time this week went to that. Our garage is still a disaster area, but still it was time well spent.
(5) I have also been focusing more on my dreams for the next phase of my life. There are several different "projects" I want to embark on as I enter this new season of my life. It is hard to get started and to figure out all the details. But I'm not getting deterred. I'm moving forward and making solid steps to make things happen.
(6) I've fed my spirit. There are a couple things that fall into this category but one is that I went to a meditation class offered at my church this week. They have been offering these every week for a long time. They always sounded neat, but I couldn't ever find time to go. When I was working, Sunday nights were a busy time when we were all trying to get ready for the week. And this fall, I've been keeping a standing commitment with my mom to attend a concert series. Now that is over, and I finally got a chance to attend the meditation class.
As I prepared to go to the class, I was nervous. Meditation is a little whoo-whoo in my book. I'm a native Texan. No offense to anyone, but culturally I get a little skeptical about things that are at all new agey. And I'm a Type A personality with a never ending to-do list. It is hard for me to sit for long periods and "do nothing."
In college, I also had a bad experience at a Quaker quiet meeting. Only five of us showed up. Everyone was so sweet, but we almost immediately went into a 60 minute session of everyone sitting quietly in silent prayer in close quarters. I spent the whole time desperately trying to not look at my girl friend whom I had convinced to go with me, I knew we'd burst into a fit of giggles if we made eye contact. I was also struggling to not giggle even with my eyes closed. And I was very worried my tummy would grumble because it was lunch time. It was not exactly a spiritual experience as I prayed over and over: "Lord, help me not laugh or have a growling tummy!"
With that history, and some trepidation, I went to the meditation class at my church. It was lovely. And I did fine. No urge to giggle. I don't think I had any tummy noises, though I heard some around me. That is fine. And I was amazed at how long the class lasted. I had told my family I'd be home in an hour. The class lasted 1 1/2 hours! But I thoroughly enjoyed myself and felt at peace. I've also felt like I've had several important epiphanies and important moments of self-understanding this week. Anyhow, I cannot go again this week, but I am going to make a tremendous effort to go again soon.
I hope you are having a lovely Sunday!
(1) I'm appreciating my belongings. I have been cleaning out my house slowly this fall. Trying to get rid of things that I don't use or need. I've given a lot to thrift stores. And cleaning out helps me to see what I own. I've realized some things I was holding on to are just broken and need to be thrown out. And some things I'm rediscovering with gladness. I recently realized my 17 year old tea kettle needed replacement. I did that last week and I've been enjoying tea again. I've even learned out to make chai latte, which is a fun way to start my day. Several of the items in this list flow from this new found pleasure in tea drinking.
(2) I had some herb tea one afternoon. I always start my day with some tea for the caffeine. But that is all I have. I'm too sensitive to caffeine to have more than that. And I'm always running around, too busy to have tea without caffeine. The other day, however, I made time to make myself a little pot of herb tea and enjoyed it throughout the afternoon. What a lovely little luxury!
(3) I rearranged my teas. So, I wasn't even drinking tea much, but I had quite a collection. I've been slowing working my way through it this fall. But particularly as I have been drinking more tea this week, I've found that the little containers I used to organize different types were chaotic. So, I took a few minutes (while waiting for water to boil!) to organize my stash. Now I can find non-caffeinated teas quickly if I get a moment to enjoy some.
(4) I have been focusing more on relationships. I haven't gotten as much done in terms of de-cluttering our home this week, but that is ok. I'm focusing more time on relationship. I am blessed to have a lot of wonderful folks in my life, but that takes time to make time for us to spend together. A good chunk of my free time this week went to that. Our garage is still a disaster area, but still it was time well spent.
(5) I have also been focusing more on my dreams for the next phase of my life. There are several different "projects" I want to embark on as I enter this new season of my life. It is hard to get started and to figure out all the details. But I'm not getting deterred. I'm moving forward and making solid steps to make things happen.
(6) I've fed my spirit. There are a couple things that fall into this category but one is that I went to a meditation class offered at my church this week. They have been offering these every week for a long time. They always sounded neat, but I couldn't ever find time to go. When I was working, Sunday nights were a busy time when we were all trying to get ready for the week. And this fall, I've been keeping a standing commitment with my mom to attend a concert series. Now that is over, and I finally got a chance to attend the meditation class.
As I prepared to go to the class, I was nervous. Meditation is a little whoo-whoo in my book. I'm a native Texan. No offense to anyone, but culturally I get a little skeptical about things that are at all new agey. And I'm a Type A personality with a never ending to-do list. It is hard for me to sit for long periods and "do nothing."
In college, I also had a bad experience at a Quaker quiet meeting. Only five of us showed up. Everyone was so sweet, but we almost immediately went into a 60 minute session of everyone sitting quietly in silent prayer in close quarters. I spent the whole time desperately trying to not look at my girl friend whom I had convinced to go with me, I knew we'd burst into a fit of giggles if we made eye contact. I was also struggling to not giggle even with my eyes closed. And I was very worried my tummy would grumble because it was lunch time. It was not exactly a spiritual experience as I prayed over and over: "Lord, help me not laugh or have a growling tummy!"
With that history, and some trepidation, I went to the meditation class at my church. It was lovely. And I did fine. No urge to giggle. I don't think I had any tummy noises, though I heard some around me. That is fine. And I was amazed at how long the class lasted. I had told my family I'd be home in an hour. The class lasted 1 1/2 hours! But I thoroughly enjoyed myself and felt at peace. I've also felt like I've had several important epiphanies and important moments of self-understanding this week. Anyhow, I cannot go again this week, but I am going to make a tremendous effort to go again soon.
I hope you are having a lovely Sunday!
Friday, November 22, 2013
Back to the Backstory
OK, so I explained how I first came across the concept of voluntary simplicity by accident at a difficult time in my life. I was running fast on the treadmill wondering if this was all that life had in store, hoping there might be more. I was so moved by Mr. Shut's book. And I sensed real truth in the words and ideas I found in its pages. (Actually, Truth with a capital "t.") The life I was living did not seem to match my core values as a Christ follower. My life did not immediately change, but I did have a huge epiphany that scrambling to climb the corporate ladder was pointless and not what I wanted out of life.
But my life did not change over night for several reasons.
First, a lot of folks wish they had the opportunity to be on that ladder. I had worked very hard and had good luck. Plenty of folks I went to law school with would have given much for access to the ladder. And I was doing a better job climbing it than others on the ladder with me at that point. Moreover, the nature of the job market in corporate America was such that if I stepped off the ladder, I would never get that opportunity again. Once off the ladder, someone else takes your spot and you are deemed to not be qualified enough to climb any more. I'm not a rash person, so I didn't just finish Mr. Shut's book, then walk into my boss's office and quit.
Plus by that time, my husband and I were parents, and we were anticipating the adoption of our second child very soon. We also had a mortgage, car loans, as well as my student loans. So, jumping off the treadmill immediately seemed implausible and irresponsible. But something in my heart had changed. I had become very aware of the futility of office politics and the emptiness of the suburban mini-mansions filled with stylish furnishings.
During that time of my life, when I thought about what did fill my life with meaning, what I wanted to fill it with instead of workplace pettiness and well-appointed homes, it was clear to me the answer was my family. I had a husband I thought was pretty awesome, but we didn't get to spend enough time together. We had an amazing toddler whom we never got to see except for brief period right before and after she went to bed. For years, I'd heard that for working parents, "quality time" was key. But I was finding that quality was rather pointless if the quantity was so scarce. We had so little time with our daughter, we were about to have a second child in our family and we were scrambling to find time to do laundry or get some prepackaged food from the store. My husband and I both had such demanding corporate jobs, we weren't living. In retrospect, we were barely hanging on.
Finally, I had an even greater epiphany. I was reading a number of books on voluntary simplicity at that point. (More on those later!) And I had realized that becoming a one income family would greatly simplify our lives and give us more time as a family. My husband was on a business trip when I had this big epiphany, so I noodled on it a couple days before I got a chance to share it with him. By then, I had thought it through more and realized that for a number of reasons, at least on paper, it made more sense for him to quit his job. I made more money and he had been in his profession much longer than me, so he would more easily be able to get back into the work force later on in time. He had been traveling in remote parts of Oklahoma visiting his company's oil fields when after several days he was somewhere where he got a bit of cell phone signal. We only had a moment, so after he shared a bit about his trip, I blurted out my epiphany quickly. He was outside on top of a windy hill, he asked, "You want me to do what?" I repeated my brainstorm. The phone went silent, I thought maybe he had lost signal. I asked if he were still there. His voice dropped deadpan and he simply said, "We're going to have to talk when I get home."
We did eventually talk about the idea at length. Pretty quickly, he agreed about the logic of having one of us stay home, particularly after we adopted our second child. It took more discussion, but soon he agreed that all signs seemed to point to him being the stay-at-home parent. We were both so thrilled. We made the decision with time to spare, so we had time to work at scaling back our spending, paying off some of our debt, and stocking away some savings. By the time our second child came along, we were in good shape for him to leave his career.
So, we had several years when I was the sole breadwinner and we had more time as a family. My husband took over all the household responsibilities, so when I was home, we could focus on being together and enjoying each other's company--not rushing to the dry cleaner's while trying to figure out we'd feed everyone for supper. Those were good times. But as I progressed in my career, I was constantly working to set barriers and eek out a personal life. It was always a struggle. And I had reason to fear that eventually I would lose in the battle to not have my career consume my life. There were some sane, humane people in the managerial ranks at my company who had been somewhat supportive of my efforts at work-life balance. But I could see the writing on the wall. Those folks would be retiring before long and the men who were poised to take their place were single-minded and unsympathetic to anything but the bottom line.
Due to this situation, I decided to make a huge career change and go into academia. It is notoriously competitive to become a tenure-track professor, it is something people in my profession carefully plan and prepare for before going on the market. However, on a last minute whim one year, I threw my hat in the ring and got very lucky. It was scary. Accepting the job meant giving up not only a very lucrative and stable career with my company, but my husband would be forever giving up on his career since we had to move to an entirely different part of the country where his resume would be less relevant. But we took the plunge. The lure of a much more flexible schedule and summers off at least in some respects was appealing. I was also excited to do work that I thought I would find more meaningful. I like mentoring young people, exploring ideas and writing.
Initially, my schedule was pretty good and life was great. I've always enjoyed the people I worked with, but as an academic I particularly loved and respected my colleagues. What a diverse, dedicated, talented group of folks. But there were administrative issues. We had three deans in my first three years. All of that became more and more of a drain for the school's focus, and to my great disappointment the office politics became worse than anything I've ever experienced in any other workplace.
Meanwhile, my children were getting older and I had felt like I had really missed out. Their childhood had passed me by! I'd always hoped and planned that we'd adopt again, but I blinked and found myself in my 40s. It was dawning on me this was not something I could continue to push off into the nebulous future. And in the midst of all this, my husband had gone back to school and had begun a new career in a helping profession. The writing on the wall had become clear that now I needed to step off the career freeway for a while.
So that brings me up to the present day. Homeschooling stay-at-home mom looking to possibly adopt again. And finally having the time for life that I've craved for years. Though even without a paid gig, there are still not enough hours in the day!
I want to flag that that has been just my journey towards voluntary simplicity, but that is certainly not the only path. I've known people who've taken very different paths. You don't have to be a parent or a white collar worker or married to embrace simplicity. I think all it really takes is an awareness of the emptiness of our modern American lifestyle that focuses on working to consume more than we need, and a hope that there might be another way.
I'm here to encourage you that there is!
But my life did not change over night for several reasons.
First, a lot of folks wish they had the opportunity to be on that ladder. I had worked very hard and had good luck. Plenty of folks I went to law school with would have given much for access to the ladder. And I was doing a better job climbing it than others on the ladder with me at that point. Moreover, the nature of the job market in corporate America was such that if I stepped off the ladder, I would never get that opportunity again. Once off the ladder, someone else takes your spot and you are deemed to not be qualified enough to climb any more. I'm not a rash person, so I didn't just finish Mr. Shut's book, then walk into my boss's office and quit.
Plus by that time, my husband and I were parents, and we were anticipating the adoption of our second child very soon. We also had a mortgage, car loans, as well as my student loans. So, jumping off the treadmill immediately seemed implausible and irresponsible. But something in my heart had changed. I had become very aware of the futility of office politics and the emptiness of the suburban mini-mansions filled with stylish furnishings.
During that time of my life, when I thought about what did fill my life with meaning, what I wanted to fill it with instead of workplace pettiness and well-appointed homes, it was clear to me the answer was my family. I had a husband I thought was pretty awesome, but we didn't get to spend enough time together. We had an amazing toddler whom we never got to see except for brief period right before and after she went to bed. For years, I'd heard that for working parents, "quality time" was key. But I was finding that quality was rather pointless if the quantity was so scarce. We had so little time with our daughter, we were about to have a second child in our family and we were scrambling to find time to do laundry or get some prepackaged food from the store. My husband and I both had such demanding corporate jobs, we weren't living. In retrospect, we were barely hanging on.
Finally, I had an even greater epiphany. I was reading a number of books on voluntary simplicity at that point. (More on those later!) And I had realized that becoming a one income family would greatly simplify our lives and give us more time as a family. My husband was on a business trip when I had this big epiphany, so I noodled on it a couple days before I got a chance to share it with him. By then, I had thought it through more and realized that for a number of reasons, at least on paper, it made more sense for him to quit his job. I made more money and he had been in his profession much longer than me, so he would more easily be able to get back into the work force later on in time. He had been traveling in remote parts of Oklahoma visiting his company's oil fields when after several days he was somewhere where he got a bit of cell phone signal. We only had a moment, so after he shared a bit about his trip, I blurted out my epiphany quickly. He was outside on top of a windy hill, he asked, "You want me to do what?" I repeated my brainstorm. The phone went silent, I thought maybe he had lost signal. I asked if he were still there. His voice dropped deadpan and he simply said, "We're going to have to talk when I get home."
We did eventually talk about the idea at length. Pretty quickly, he agreed about the logic of having one of us stay home, particularly after we adopted our second child. It took more discussion, but soon he agreed that all signs seemed to point to him being the stay-at-home parent. We were both so thrilled. We made the decision with time to spare, so we had time to work at scaling back our spending, paying off some of our debt, and stocking away some savings. By the time our second child came along, we were in good shape for him to leave his career.
So, we had several years when I was the sole breadwinner and we had more time as a family. My husband took over all the household responsibilities, so when I was home, we could focus on being together and enjoying each other's company--not rushing to the dry cleaner's while trying to figure out we'd feed everyone for supper. Those were good times. But as I progressed in my career, I was constantly working to set barriers and eek out a personal life. It was always a struggle. And I had reason to fear that eventually I would lose in the battle to not have my career consume my life. There were some sane, humane people in the managerial ranks at my company who had been somewhat supportive of my efforts at work-life balance. But I could see the writing on the wall. Those folks would be retiring before long and the men who were poised to take their place were single-minded and unsympathetic to anything but the bottom line.
Due to this situation, I decided to make a huge career change and go into academia. It is notoriously competitive to become a tenure-track professor, it is something people in my profession carefully plan and prepare for before going on the market. However, on a last minute whim one year, I threw my hat in the ring and got very lucky. It was scary. Accepting the job meant giving up not only a very lucrative and stable career with my company, but my husband would be forever giving up on his career since we had to move to an entirely different part of the country where his resume would be less relevant. But we took the plunge. The lure of a much more flexible schedule and summers off at least in some respects was appealing. I was also excited to do work that I thought I would find more meaningful. I like mentoring young people, exploring ideas and writing.
Initially, my schedule was pretty good and life was great. I've always enjoyed the people I worked with, but as an academic I particularly loved and respected my colleagues. What a diverse, dedicated, talented group of folks. But there were administrative issues. We had three deans in my first three years. All of that became more and more of a drain for the school's focus, and to my great disappointment the office politics became worse than anything I've ever experienced in any other workplace.
Meanwhile, my children were getting older and I had felt like I had really missed out. Their childhood had passed me by! I'd always hoped and planned that we'd adopt again, but I blinked and found myself in my 40s. It was dawning on me this was not something I could continue to push off into the nebulous future. And in the midst of all this, my husband had gone back to school and had begun a new career in a helping profession. The writing on the wall had become clear that now I needed to step off the career freeway for a while.
So that brings me up to the present day. Homeschooling stay-at-home mom looking to possibly adopt again. And finally having the time for life that I've craved for years. Though even without a paid gig, there are still not enough hours in the day!
I want to flag that that has been just my journey towards voluntary simplicity, but that is certainly not the only path. I've known people who've taken very different paths. You don't have to be a parent or a white collar worker or married to embrace simplicity. I think all it really takes is an awareness of the emptiness of our modern American lifestyle that focuses on working to consume more than we need, and a hope that there might be another way.
I'm here to encourage you that there is!
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Simply Sunday #10
Hello! Hope your Sunday is going well.
Because we've been traveling, I haven't posted for a while. And we just got back home from our final trip, so I don't have a whole lot to offer for this week's installment of Simply Sunday, but here goes:
(1) Reorganized some kitchen cabinets and laundry room shelves. For most of our kids' lives to-date, my husband was the stay-at-home parent and I was the sole breadwinner. So he was in charge of the house. He is very good at many domestic things, but he is organizationally challenged in a major way. I'm not organized by my inherent nature, but I've seen what happens when there is not structure and organization. Resources get wasted--be they time, money, appliances, etc. You just get more out of life with less effort if you are organized. So I always joke that if being disorganized were a disease, I'd be working my way through the 12 Steps, while my husband would still be in denial that he had a problem. So with that back story, imagine the transition as we flip roles this fall such that he becomes the sole breadwinner and I take charge of the home! Yikes. Suffice it to say I've been incredibly frustrated at the amount of clutter and flat out mess as I open cabinets and doors I've ignored the past many years. I've been trying to declutter my own excess, while encouraging him to clean out/up his many messes. Having lukewarm success on these things. Rome was not built in a day, and meanwhile life goes on, so we cannot focus 100% on construction. (Or de-construction, in our case.) So, this week, I've tried to begin focusing on reorganizing the kitchen and laundry room now that I'm using those parts of our home more. I'm really excited! Not nearly close to being done, mind you. But I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel. I'm finding things I didn't know we had that frankly will come in handy. Christmas has come early! And I'm looking forward to taking care of business more now that at least some things will be easier to find. Although please pray that the organization takes root. Despite my pleading over the years, my husband has a not-so-endearing habit of stuffing junk places it doesn't belong. In the immortal words of George Costanza: Serenity Now, Serenity Now!
(2) Used neglected appliances, got rid of broken one. So one of the by-products of my reorganization of at least some kitchen cabinets is that I'm finding--or at least getting access to--appliances that had not been used in a while. I don't want to keep things we won't get use out of. That just clutters our home, complicates our lives, and they could be used and appreciated by other folks. So, in light of this situation, as I write there is fresh bread baking in our bread machine. Booya! And paninis and/or waffles may be in the near future. I'm also thinking of the many types of hummus I could make with the food processor. Meanwhile, as I do this initial inventory, I have come to the realization that the tea kettle we got as a wedding present 17 years ago has bit the dust in multiple, unfixable ways. It is in the recycle bin, not appropriate for donation to a thrift store or other charity. And because I drink tea every morning to get my caffeine fix, my husband researched and bought me a handy-dandy new electric tea kettle that goes on the kitchen counter and will no longer take up space on my stove, which made cooking tricky. Simple pleasures!
(3) Been more cognizant of the façades we build. Another thing I've been doing lately is inspired by my recent traveling. When we travel, we get out of our homes, our routines, our ways of doing things, and we're exposed to different people and different ways of living. I find that fascinating! In doing that, I've just become more and more cognizant that no one's life is perfect. Every relationship, every house, every job has flaws. When we only look at the surface, things seem glamorous and in place. If we then compare that façade to our imperfect lives, it is depressing and demoralizing! But I've been thinking more and more about how there is imperfection in everyone's lives, and as I'm traveling, I see evidence of that all around me. It is a real comfort and encouraging. It helps me feel less frustrated about the imperfections in my own life.
(4) Taking time for fun, people. Traveling has also liberated me from routine to focus on having fun and making the people in my life a priority. I'm always so task-oriented. That has served me well in both my professional and personal life. I've had a great career, and I have a blessed home life. But being so task-oriented, that can get in the way of having fun and building memories. As people I've known pass away--sometimes in old age, but sometimes prematurely at way too young an age--I have sometimes been struck by how I missed opportunities with them. I don't believe in wallowing in guilt or regret. That is not productive. But I do believe in seeing where we went astray and trying our best to not make the same mistakes (or similar ones) in the future. None of us knows how much time we have on this planet. We're fools if we think we're guaranteed a certain number of decades. So it is important to recognize this dynamic and take every day as a gift, get everything out of it we can. I've made some great memories with my kids recently, from collecting shells to trying new kinds of olives to teaching them about the internet. I'm so grateful for those opportunities. Don't want to pass up others!
So in that spirit. . . go out and make it a great one!
Because we've been traveling, I haven't posted for a while. And we just got back home from our final trip, so I don't have a whole lot to offer for this week's installment of Simply Sunday, but here goes:
(1) Reorganized some kitchen cabinets and laundry room shelves. For most of our kids' lives to-date, my husband was the stay-at-home parent and I was the sole breadwinner. So he was in charge of the house. He is very good at many domestic things, but he is organizationally challenged in a major way. I'm not organized by my inherent nature, but I've seen what happens when there is not structure and organization. Resources get wasted--be they time, money, appliances, etc. You just get more out of life with less effort if you are organized. So I always joke that if being disorganized were a disease, I'd be working my way through the 12 Steps, while my husband would still be in denial that he had a problem. So with that back story, imagine the transition as we flip roles this fall such that he becomes the sole breadwinner and I take charge of the home! Yikes. Suffice it to say I've been incredibly frustrated at the amount of clutter and flat out mess as I open cabinets and doors I've ignored the past many years. I've been trying to declutter my own excess, while encouraging him to clean out/up his many messes. Having lukewarm success on these things. Rome was not built in a day, and meanwhile life goes on, so we cannot focus 100% on construction. (Or de-construction, in our case.) So, this week, I've tried to begin focusing on reorganizing the kitchen and laundry room now that I'm using those parts of our home more. I'm really excited! Not nearly close to being done, mind you. But I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel. I'm finding things I didn't know we had that frankly will come in handy. Christmas has come early! And I'm looking forward to taking care of business more now that at least some things will be easier to find. Although please pray that the organization takes root. Despite my pleading over the years, my husband has a not-so-endearing habit of stuffing junk places it doesn't belong. In the immortal words of George Costanza: Serenity Now, Serenity Now!
(2) Used neglected appliances, got rid of broken one. So one of the by-products of my reorganization of at least some kitchen cabinets is that I'm finding--or at least getting access to--appliances that had not been used in a while. I don't want to keep things we won't get use out of. That just clutters our home, complicates our lives, and they could be used and appreciated by other folks. So, in light of this situation, as I write there is fresh bread baking in our bread machine. Booya! And paninis and/or waffles may be in the near future. I'm also thinking of the many types of hummus I could make with the food processor. Meanwhile, as I do this initial inventory, I have come to the realization that the tea kettle we got as a wedding present 17 years ago has bit the dust in multiple, unfixable ways. It is in the recycle bin, not appropriate for donation to a thrift store or other charity. And because I drink tea every morning to get my caffeine fix, my husband researched and bought me a handy-dandy new electric tea kettle that goes on the kitchen counter and will no longer take up space on my stove, which made cooking tricky. Simple pleasures!
(3) Been more cognizant of the façades we build. Another thing I've been doing lately is inspired by my recent traveling. When we travel, we get out of our homes, our routines, our ways of doing things, and we're exposed to different people and different ways of living. I find that fascinating! In doing that, I've just become more and more cognizant that no one's life is perfect. Every relationship, every house, every job has flaws. When we only look at the surface, things seem glamorous and in place. If we then compare that façade to our imperfect lives, it is depressing and demoralizing! But I've been thinking more and more about how there is imperfection in everyone's lives, and as I'm traveling, I see evidence of that all around me. It is a real comfort and encouraging. It helps me feel less frustrated about the imperfections in my own life.
(4) Taking time for fun, people. Traveling has also liberated me from routine to focus on having fun and making the people in my life a priority. I'm always so task-oriented. That has served me well in both my professional and personal life. I've had a great career, and I have a blessed home life. But being so task-oriented, that can get in the way of having fun and building memories. As people I've known pass away--sometimes in old age, but sometimes prematurely at way too young an age--I have sometimes been struck by how I missed opportunities with them. I don't believe in wallowing in guilt or regret. That is not productive. But I do believe in seeing where we went astray and trying our best to not make the same mistakes (or similar ones) in the future. None of us knows how much time we have on this planet. We're fools if we think we're guaranteed a certain number of decades. So it is important to recognize this dynamic and take every day as a gift, get everything out of it we can. I've made some great memories with my kids recently, from collecting shells to trying new kinds of olives to teaching them about the internet. I'm so grateful for those opportunities. Don't want to pass up others!
So in that spirit. . . go out and make it a great one!
Monday, November 4, 2013
Visiting
Our family has been traveling and visiting loved ones, so I have not had time to blog much recently.
This is going to sound weird but I love funerals and visiting for similar reasons. I warned you this would sound weird, so let me explain.
Certainly, I don't enjoy grief or seeing others in pain at the loss of someone they love. Mourning is not the part of funerals I like. But if you can get beyond that, I find funerals educational and encouraging. I enjoy hearing about how the deceased person lived their life. The rest of us in the room still have some time on this planet, though none of knows exactly how much. We should make the best out of whatever time we have. And hearing how someone else used their time is insightful to me and inspires me. I always learn things that help me to be a better person. For that reason, I appreciate funerals a great deal. They force us to step back from our hectic lives to pause and reflect. Is this really how we want to spend our limited time? If not, what can we change?
Similarly, I enjoy visiting people. Whether I go to someone's home for a few hours or for days, I enjoy seeing how people live their lives. Again, I find that insightful and inspiring.
In our traveling, our family spent about a week at the home of some folks we love. I have a couple things I learned from that experience:
(1) No one's home is perfect and the longer you live in it, the more likely you will realize this. I don't mean for this to sound ugly, I don't intend it like that in the least. Here's the back story. I'm not the sort of woman who spends tons of time and effort on home décor. I think that is interesting. I like visually pleasing things as much as anyone. But I guess, ultimately, that sort of thing is not my cup of tea. There are other things I'd rather do with my time and money. I'm more of a functional sort of home decorator. I like to have interesting things decorating my home, but I'll never make the cover of Architectural Digest or even Cottage Living. That is fine. But sometimes I begin to feel insecure when I visit someone else's home and it just is so clean and hip looking. It makes me feel like a slacker/slob/loser. The home we were visiting was just amazing. A historic home that had had interior updates to make it more functional and hipper. On our first few days as guests, I felt like such a schlub. Why didn't our family live in such a cool home? How could our hostess keep it so spotless so effortlessly while we seem to constantly have dust and pet stains on our carpet?! But the longer we spent in the house, I could begin to see the imperfections. You don't notice a house's imperfections immediately. If you are just staying for a meal, cards or a children's play date, you may not be there long enough to see. But the more times you use the bathroom, eat in the kitchen, walk in and out of the front door, you do begin to see the places where the paint has chipped, the tile wasn't aligned right, or the hinges are coming loose. This was so reassuring to me. It made me feel like less of a schlub on many levels. I realized that I notice the imperfections of my home because I'm in it so much, but others who come visit us don't necessarily notice all of them unless they are staying longer than a few hours. And it helped me recognize that when I go to someone's house for just a few hours and I feel in such awe of their home, there is probably a lot of imperfection I'm just not noticing because I'm not there long enough to get a good look!
(2) I really enjoy our home being in tune with the elements outdoors. Our hosts have some health issues such that they don't open their windows and the interior is always climate controlled. I certainly appreciate that, but at our house we take a different approach, which I grew to really appreciate during our visit. For many reasons, we try to use a/c and heat as sparingly as we can. We open windows whenever possible. In winter, we take advantage of passive solar during the day, we put on layers of thermal clothing, and sleep with lots of warm blankets at night. In summer, we use curtains to block the sun, we have fans all over the house and we drink lots of cold beverages. At times, it is a bit of a sacrifice to not use a/c and heat more. But one thing I really like is that it helps us to be in tune with nature. Previously when we used a/c and heat more liberally, we were literally and figuratively insulated from what was happening outside. Now I realize I don't like that. I like to hear the birds chirping outside. I like to have the sun light up our home in cooler months. I don't want to be so cool in my home that I'm shocked at the heat when I go outside.
(3) Relationships are so important. Traveling required us to take a break from homeschooling, church and our kids' sports. I'm so task oriented, that makes me a bit nervous. But taking time to be with my kids and to be with the family we visited is so important. Relationships don't just happen. They need time and attention. It is good to do that. Ultimately, it is the people in our lives who are most important anyhow. And frankly, I just really enjoy getting to know people better--whether it is someone in my immediate family whom I see every day but don't have time to be silly with or someone I don't get to see on a regular basis. People are interesting. I like hearing their stories and struggles and interests and quirkiness. It is fun and I learn a lot from them in various ways.
(4) Messes aren't the end of the world. Ok, so I'm not into fancy home décor, but I'm rather mess averse. One of my big triggers/stressors is when my kids or husband spill something or leaves crumbs. Part of this is just that I have had trouble training my husband of nearly 20 years to clean up thoroughly and it has a trickle down effect with my kids. That is the bane of my existence at times. And I grew up in a densely populated urban area where any trace of food not cleaned up would exacerbate the bug problems our apartment complex was always fighting with fairly intense extermination sprayings. But our hostess was so calm when kids spilled drinks at the dining room table or things got messy when we cooked together. This helped everyone be happier and enjoy each other more. I know I would not have been so gracious about spills and would likely have not even attempted cooking with a kitchen full of kids, which would have been a shame. So, I don't know how long it will last, but I am going to try to be more laid back about messes. Our hostess had no carpet, so I think that does make a difference. Non-carpeted surfaces like in our home are easier to clean. Nonetheless, I can try to be less uptight about messes.
This is going to sound weird but I love funerals and visiting for similar reasons. I warned you this would sound weird, so let me explain.
Certainly, I don't enjoy grief or seeing others in pain at the loss of someone they love. Mourning is not the part of funerals I like. But if you can get beyond that, I find funerals educational and encouraging. I enjoy hearing about how the deceased person lived their life. The rest of us in the room still have some time on this planet, though none of knows exactly how much. We should make the best out of whatever time we have. And hearing how someone else used their time is insightful to me and inspires me. I always learn things that help me to be a better person. For that reason, I appreciate funerals a great deal. They force us to step back from our hectic lives to pause and reflect. Is this really how we want to spend our limited time? If not, what can we change?
Similarly, I enjoy visiting people. Whether I go to someone's home for a few hours or for days, I enjoy seeing how people live their lives. Again, I find that insightful and inspiring.
In our traveling, our family spent about a week at the home of some folks we love. I have a couple things I learned from that experience:
(1) No one's home is perfect and the longer you live in it, the more likely you will realize this. I don't mean for this to sound ugly, I don't intend it like that in the least. Here's the back story. I'm not the sort of woman who spends tons of time and effort on home décor. I think that is interesting. I like visually pleasing things as much as anyone. But I guess, ultimately, that sort of thing is not my cup of tea. There are other things I'd rather do with my time and money. I'm more of a functional sort of home decorator. I like to have interesting things decorating my home, but I'll never make the cover of Architectural Digest or even Cottage Living. That is fine. But sometimes I begin to feel insecure when I visit someone else's home and it just is so clean and hip looking. It makes me feel like a slacker/slob/loser. The home we were visiting was just amazing. A historic home that had had interior updates to make it more functional and hipper. On our first few days as guests, I felt like such a schlub. Why didn't our family live in such a cool home? How could our hostess keep it so spotless so effortlessly while we seem to constantly have dust and pet stains on our carpet?! But the longer we spent in the house, I could begin to see the imperfections. You don't notice a house's imperfections immediately. If you are just staying for a meal, cards or a children's play date, you may not be there long enough to see. But the more times you use the bathroom, eat in the kitchen, walk in and out of the front door, you do begin to see the places where the paint has chipped, the tile wasn't aligned right, or the hinges are coming loose. This was so reassuring to me. It made me feel like less of a schlub on many levels. I realized that I notice the imperfections of my home because I'm in it so much, but others who come visit us don't necessarily notice all of them unless they are staying longer than a few hours. And it helped me recognize that when I go to someone's house for just a few hours and I feel in such awe of their home, there is probably a lot of imperfection I'm just not noticing because I'm not there long enough to get a good look!
(2) I really enjoy our home being in tune with the elements outdoors. Our hosts have some health issues such that they don't open their windows and the interior is always climate controlled. I certainly appreciate that, but at our house we take a different approach, which I grew to really appreciate during our visit. For many reasons, we try to use a/c and heat as sparingly as we can. We open windows whenever possible. In winter, we take advantage of passive solar during the day, we put on layers of thermal clothing, and sleep with lots of warm blankets at night. In summer, we use curtains to block the sun, we have fans all over the house and we drink lots of cold beverages. At times, it is a bit of a sacrifice to not use a/c and heat more. But one thing I really like is that it helps us to be in tune with nature. Previously when we used a/c and heat more liberally, we were literally and figuratively insulated from what was happening outside. Now I realize I don't like that. I like to hear the birds chirping outside. I like to have the sun light up our home in cooler months. I don't want to be so cool in my home that I'm shocked at the heat when I go outside.
(3) Relationships are so important. Traveling required us to take a break from homeschooling, church and our kids' sports. I'm so task oriented, that makes me a bit nervous. But taking time to be with my kids and to be with the family we visited is so important. Relationships don't just happen. They need time and attention. It is good to do that. Ultimately, it is the people in our lives who are most important anyhow. And frankly, I just really enjoy getting to know people better--whether it is someone in my immediate family whom I see every day but don't have time to be silly with or someone I don't get to see on a regular basis. People are interesting. I like hearing their stories and struggles and interests and quirkiness. It is fun and I learn a lot from them in various ways.
(4) Messes aren't the end of the world. Ok, so I'm not into fancy home décor, but I'm rather mess averse. One of my big triggers/stressors is when my kids or husband spill something or leaves crumbs. Part of this is just that I have had trouble training my husband of nearly 20 years to clean up thoroughly and it has a trickle down effect with my kids. That is the bane of my existence at times. And I grew up in a densely populated urban area where any trace of food not cleaned up would exacerbate the bug problems our apartment complex was always fighting with fairly intense extermination sprayings. But our hostess was so calm when kids spilled drinks at the dining room table or things got messy when we cooked together. This helped everyone be happier and enjoy each other more. I know I would not have been so gracious about spills and would likely have not even attempted cooking with a kitchen full of kids, which would have been a shame. So, I don't know how long it will last, but I am going to try to be more laid back about messes. Our hostess had no carpet, so I think that does make a difference. Non-carpeted surfaces like in our home are easier to clean. Nonetheless, I can try to be less uptight about messes.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part V: One More Thing)
One last thing I want to share about this wonderful book. Fairly early on in the book, a passage that really got my attention was the following:
(p. 35)
This passage appeared in an essay about how our modern work load has been increasing over the last few decades, and we have so little time left over after our paid gigs that it leads to serious health and social problems. It had a number of great points, but this one about vacations really hit home when I first read the book about a decade ago.
At that time, I was fairly early on in my career and also building a family. Because I was a pretty junior employee at a very old school company that was not generous or flexible when it came to employee time off, I got just two weeks of vacation each year. I know many have it even worse, they have no paid time off. But two weeks out of the year to make a life is just not enough. Especially when you are an "exempt" employee where "overtime" is unpaid and just expected in great quantities. Being a corporate slave is draining.
To make matters worse, because of the inflexibility of our company's policies, we had to use our few, precious vacation days for things other than true vacations where we might recharge our batteries. For example, early on in my career, I remember being horrified when I spoke to one of the only moms in our office, and she explained that when her kids got sick and couldn't go to school, she had to take vacation time to stay home with them. There were no sick days, no personal days and no flex time. If you were not physically present in the office, you were docked vacation days for the absence. At that point, I was not yet a parent, but it depressed me to think that one day if my kids ever had any illnesses, we might never get the opportunity to take a family vacation together because I'd have no time off from work left over.
Another time early in my career, I had an uncle who passed away after a long, slow decline. Our family is small, so I didn't think twice that I needed to be present for the funeral. It was out of town but in-state about four hours away. Ours is a family of teachers, so my cousins thoughtfully arranged for the funeral to be on Dr. King's birthday, which is a national holiday and all the local schools were closed for the day. The thought was no one would miss work to be at the funeral. Not so for me as it would turn out. I was stressed to find out later that the death of my uncle was not covered under the company bereavement policy. And our company observed few national holidays. Dr. King's birthday was not one of them. So, they took one of my few vacation days that year when I had to miss one day's work to attend a family funeral. With so few days each year, I always plotted and planned carefully when I'd use each of those days, so being docked a day for the funeral really threw a fly into the ointment. It also just seemed pretty heartless.
In those days, my co-workers and I were compensated pretty well in financial terms. Indeed, I was making more money that I ever imagined I'd make, more than my parents had. I had always just wanted to do interesting work and make enough to keep a roof over my head, so this was not something I had sought. But we had no lives. We had no time to enjoy the money we were making. We had homes that we rarely saw. We could afford to fly to exotic locations, but only for a couple days at a time.
My husband and I love traveling and early in our corporate careers, we had no children. We took advantage of the situation to go to as many interesting places as possible in our brief windows of freedom. But this line in the book really hit home. Despite never being able to stay anywhere for more than a couple days, I was excited about the trips we were taking. However, this passage in the book opened my eyes. Was I really enjoying the trips and the adventure of visiting new places? Or were these trips a necessary antidote to the overbearing grind of the corporate treadmill we were on? I began to think that I was working and not really living 50 weeks of the year. Those 2 weeks of vacation were the only real living I was doing. I just didn't have time to enjoy life the rest of the year. What a depressing thought!
I pondered this dynamic a lot. I didn't just go into my boss's office immediately and quit to go be a vagabond. But I did begin to work hard to find ways to carve out more of a life from then on out. Life is short, life is precious. Wasting it to put in ridiculous hours of face time was not what I wanted.
We take vacations, but we work so hard throughout the year that they become indispensable to our sanity. The conventional wisdom that economic progress has given us more things as well as more leisure is difficult to sustain.
(p. 35)
This passage appeared in an essay about how our modern work load has been increasing over the last few decades, and we have so little time left over after our paid gigs that it leads to serious health and social problems. It had a number of great points, but this one about vacations really hit home when I first read the book about a decade ago.
At that time, I was fairly early on in my career and also building a family. Because I was a pretty junior employee at a very old school company that was not generous or flexible when it came to employee time off, I got just two weeks of vacation each year. I know many have it even worse, they have no paid time off. But two weeks out of the year to make a life is just not enough. Especially when you are an "exempt" employee where "overtime" is unpaid and just expected in great quantities. Being a corporate slave is draining.
To make matters worse, because of the inflexibility of our company's policies, we had to use our few, precious vacation days for things other than true vacations where we might recharge our batteries. For example, early on in my career, I remember being horrified when I spoke to one of the only moms in our office, and she explained that when her kids got sick and couldn't go to school, she had to take vacation time to stay home with them. There were no sick days, no personal days and no flex time. If you were not physically present in the office, you were docked vacation days for the absence. At that point, I was not yet a parent, but it depressed me to think that one day if my kids ever had any illnesses, we might never get the opportunity to take a family vacation together because I'd have no time off from work left over.
Another time early in my career, I had an uncle who passed away after a long, slow decline. Our family is small, so I didn't think twice that I needed to be present for the funeral. It was out of town but in-state about four hours away. Ours is a family of teachers, so my cousins thoughtfully arranged for the funeral to be on Dr. King's birthday, which is a national holiday and all the local schools were closed for the day. The thought was no one would miss work to be at the funeral. Not so for me as it would turn out. I was stressed to find out later that the death of my uncle was not covered under the company bereavement policy. And our company observed few national holidays. Dr. King's birthday was not one of them. So, they took one of my few vacation days that year when I had to miss one day's work to attend a family funeral. With so few days each year, I always plotted and planned carefully when I'd use each of those days, so being docked a day for the funeral really threw a fly into the ointment. It also just seemed pretty heartless.
In those days, my co-workers and I were compensated pretty well in financial terms. Indeed, I was making more money that I ever imagined I'd make, more than my parents had. I had always just wanted to do interesting work and make enough to keep a roof over my head, so this was not something I had sought. But we had no lives. We had no time to enjoy the money we were making. We had homes that we rarely saw. We could afford to fly to exotic locations, but only for a couple days at a time.
My husband and I love traveling and early in our corporate careers, we had no children. We took advantage of the situation to go to as many interesting places as possible in our brief windows of freedom. But this line in the book really hit home. Despite never being able to stay anywhere for more than a couple days, I was excited about the trips we were taking. However, this passage in the book opened my eyes. Was I really enjoying the trips and the adventure of visiting new places? Or were these trips a necessary antidote to the overbearing grind of the corporate treadmill we were on? I began to think that I was working and not really living 50 weeks of the year. Those 2 weeks of vacation were the only real living I was doing. I just didn't have time to enjoy life the rest of the year. What a depressing thought!
I pondered this dynamic a lot. I didn't just go into my boss's office immediately and quit to go be a vagabond. But I did begin to work hard to find ways to carve out more of a life from then on out. Life is short, life is precious. Wasting it to put in ridiculous hours of face time was not what I wanted.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part IV: A Few Thoughts)
I've mentioned what an epiphany this book was to me at such a difficult time in my life. My hectic work life was not leaving time for a real life. I was overinvested, perhaps not in material objects, but in things of relatively passing importance like the outcome of a single election. I was on a treadmill without a chance to breath, reflect or think about the big picture for more than a couple moments. This amazing book helped me to take a step back and look at my lifestyle from a different perspective. Here are a couple of the thoughts I had reading the collected essays and book excerpts in Simpler Living, Compassionate Life.
First, I was living a particular lifestyle. Though in my myopic existence, it had begun to seem so, not everyone was working insane hours to climb the corporate ladder and have a nice home in a golf course community. I began to think more about my brothers and sisters around the world, around my country, and even around my own region, who did not begin to have the kind of access to material goods and pleasures that I did. That reality check was helpful to see the humanity in those other people. But also to recognize that I was not obliged to stay on this seemingly endless and ultimately pointless treadmill. If others lived a different way, so could I.
Second, my choices matter. This book opened my eyes about how our Western consumer lifestyles were using disproportionate amounts of the Earth's resources and there were not enough resources for everyone to live this same lifestyle. Not everyone on the planet can drive gas guzzling cars and eat meat every day. No matter how much economic development we achieve in the world, there is just not enough petroleum or arable land for such things to happen. I haven't gone on to live a totally Spartan life. I'm not wearing camel hair robes and feeding off locusts or wild honey. But I have tried to drive more efficient cars and to drive less. I've also tried to have our family eat less meat. That is not going to be a panacea to all the world's problems. But that is ok. I want to at least be less of the problem. I want to live in a way that is not as removed from the lifestyles others are living.
Third, gratitude is important. I'm now more aware of my own privilege in getting the option of living a luxurious first world lifestyle or having the ability to cut back on my own consumption. Wow! How fortunate am I. Most people around me don't even realize how different our lifestyle is from most on this planet. And many people don't have the luxury of opting to cut back, deprivation is thrust upon them.
Four, time is what is most important. Like anyone, I don't want to be homeless, starving or naked. But beyond the necessities, unless you are independently wealthy, the more stuff we have, the less time we have. Now I realize how important time is. That is what is most valuable and we cannot make more of it. It is definitely a finite resource. Maximizing the amount of available time to enjoy the gift that is our lives and to get the most out of it by being present and grateful--that is what needs to be my focus. Not worrying about things that in the end don't matter.
Finally, I also was comforted by the writers in this book that assured us that we don't need to leave our urban or suburban lives to live off the land. That may sound romantic, but in the glaring light of reality that would never work for me. I admit I'm a total wimp who wouldn't be able to cope without electricity and easy access to a grocery store. But these authors are fortunately correct. We don't need to grow all our own food and live in a hut in the middle of no where. We can grow where we're planted--literally and figuratively. Simplicity is about decluttering in both tangible and intangible ways. It is a process, an ideal to work towards. There are shades and degrees, it is not all or nothing. It is not some dogmatic fad where you don't belong if you cannot jump in 100%. You can begin today. And I encourage you to do that if you haven't already!
First, I was living a particular lifestyle. Though in my myopic existence, it had begun to seem so, not everyone was working insane hours to climb the corporate ladder and have a nice home in a golf course community. I began to think more about my brothers and sisters around the world, around my country, and even around my own region, who did not begin to have the kind of access to material goods and pleasures that I did. That reality check was helpful to see the humanity in those other people. But also to recognize that I was not obliged to stay on this seemingly endless and ultimately pointless treadmill. If others lived a different way, so could I.
Second, my choices matter. This book opened my eyes about how our Western consumer lifestyles were using disproportionate amounts of the Earth's resources and there were not enough resources for everyone to live this same lifestyle. Not everyone on the planet can drive gas guzzling cars and eat meat every day. No matter how much economic development we achieve in the world, there is just not enough petroleum or arable land for such things to happen. I haven't gone on to live a totally Spartan life. I'm not wearing camel hair robes and feeding off locusts or wild honey. But I have tried to drive more efficient cars and to drive less. I've also tried to have our family eat less meat. That is not going to be a panacea to all the world's problems. But that is ok. I want to at least be less of the problem. I want to live in a way that is not as removed from the lifestyles others are living.
Third, gratitude is important. I'm now more aware of my own privilege in getting the option of living a luxurious first world lifestyle or having the ability to cut back on my own consumption. Wow! How fortunate am I. Most people around me don't even realize how different our lifestyle is from most on this planet. And many people don't have the luxury of opting to cut back, deprivation is thrust upon them.
Four, time is what is most important. Like anyone, I don't want to be homeless, starving or naked. But beyond the necessities, unless you are independently wealthy, the more stuff we have, the less time we have. Now I realize how important time is. That is what is most valuable and we cannot make more of it. It is definitely a finite resource. Maximizing the amount of available time to enjoy the gift that is our lives and to get the most out of it by being present and grateful--that is what needs to be my focus. Not worrying about things that in the end don't matter.
Finally, I also was comforted by the writers in this book that assured us that we don't need to leave our urban or suburban lives to live off the land. That may sound romantic, but in the glaring light of reality that would never work for me. I admit I'm a total wimp who wouldn't be able to cope without electricity and easy access to a grocery store. But these authors are fortunately correct. We don't need to grow all our own food and live in a hut in the middle of no where. We can grow where we're planted--literally and figuratively. Simplicity is about decluttering in both tangible and intangible ways. It is a process, an ideal to work towards. There are shades and degrees, it is not all or nothing. It is not some dogmatic fad where you don't belong if you cannot jump in 100%. You can begin today. And I encourage you to do that if you haven't already!
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Simply Sunday #9
Greetings on a beautiful Sunday afternoon! Hope you are having a great one.
Here is a quick list of things I did in the last week to simplify my life, to be more present and stop to enjoy life:
Cuddled with my daughter at a community concert. We went to a free outdoor concert this week. My younger daughter got cold and was tired, so I invited her to sit on my lap. We cuddled and rubbed noses and acted silly. Then she fell asleep in my arms and I just looked at her, occasionally kissing her head. She is so beautiful and I'm so lucky to be her mom. She is getting to be a big girl. She doesn't normally sit on my lap any more. So, this was so special. I am a Type A gal, but I tried to just savor the moment. It was precious!
Acted as an audience. A friend from church was going to be playing a duet at a local concert of classical music. Out of the blue, she asked if my kids and I could be an audience for a run-through of their performance a couple days before the actual show. I'm not sure why she asked us, but we re-arranged our schedule and dropped some nonessential things to do it. She needed an audience and we wanted to help. We don't know anything about classical music, but it was pretty. It is nice to help and to try new things.
Social media posting fast. Like many people, I have mixed feelings about technology. I essentially lived the first half of my life without computers, the internet or cell phones. Certainly, those things have been tremendous gifts in many ways. But I also see what a distraction and time-suck those are. You can lose many hours in an empty way just using those items so frequently or for such long periods of time. I'm fairly new to social media and often find it exciting how much interesting information is out there. Sometimes I get particularly excited by what I read and like to share it. But I see a couple problems with that. First, that takes up more time than I'd prefer in my own life. Second, I may be contributing to a similar problem for others who then have to take time to process what I've shared. To alleviate this problem, I vowed to not post anything for one week. The last thing I posted was a simple living themed meme reminding us to value people, not things. My account has been silent since then. It has been rather liberating!
Play dates. I made time in our schedule for a play date in a park with a lovely family from our church. We spent a lot of time after services letting our kids play and the parents visit. Such a neat family! And in the process, we met another neat family whom our friends knew and happened to be playing in the park. Turns out they live in our neighborhood. Later in the same week, I hosted a slumber party for my kids' friends who have moved to the other side of town and we rarely see anymore. I also got to visit with their mom with whom I have a lot in common. We all had a great time. Good to stop and smell the roses with other people.
Happy Sunday! Make it a good one.
Here is a quick list of things I did in the last week to simplify my life, to be more present and stop to enjoy life:
Cuddled with my daughter at a community concert. We went to a free outdoor concert this week. My younger daughter got cold and was tired, so I invited her to sit on my lap. We cuddled and rubbed noses and acted silly. Then she fell asleep in my arms and I just looked at her, occasionally kissing her head. She is so beautiful and I'm so lucky to be her mom. She is getting to be a big girl. She doesn't normally sit on my lap any more. So, this was so special. I am a Type A gal, but I tried to just savor the moment. It was precious!
Acted as an audience. A friend from church was going to be playing a duet at a local concert of classical music. Out of the blue, she asked if my kids and I could be an audience for a run-through of their performance a couple days before the actual show. I'm not sure why she asked us, but we re-arranged our schedule and dropped some nonessential things to do it. She needed an audience and we wanted to help. We don't know anything about classical music, but it was pretty. It is nice to help and to try new things.
Social media posting fast. Like many people, I have mixed feelings about technology. I essentially lived the first half of my life without computers, the internet or cell phones. Certainly, those things have been tremendous gifts in many ways. But I also see what a distraction and time-suck those are. You can lose many hours in an empty way just using those items so frequently or for such long periods of time. I'm fairly new to social media and often find it exciting how much interesting information is out there. Sometimes I get particularly excited by what I read and like to share it. But I see a couple problems with that. First, that takes up more time than I'd prefer in my own life. Second, I may be contributing to a similar problem for others who then have to take time to process what I've shared. To alleviate this problem, I vowed to not post anything for one week. The last thing I posted was a simple living themed meme reminding us to value people, not things. My account has been silent since then. It has been rather liberating!
Play dates. I made time in our schedule for a play date in a park with a lovely family from our church. We spent a lot of time after services letting our kids play and the parents visit. Such a neat family! And in the process, we met another neat family whom our friends knew and happened to be playing in the park. Turns out they live in our neighborhood. Later in the same week, I hosted a slumber party for my kids' friends who have moved to the other side of town and we rarely see anymore. I also got to visit with their mom with whom I have a lot in common. We all had a great time. Good to stop and smell the roses with other people.
Happy Sunday! Make it a good one.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part III: Random Passages That I Liked)
I am a reader. I have earned several degrees, practiced a profession where reading was a mainstay, and then I spent the last part of my professional career as an academic where I read even more. And on top of all those motivations, I also enjoy reading for pleasure.
I've realized over the years that I'm a fairly kinesthetic learner. I cannot just sit still and read. To take in what I'm reading, I have to underline, highlight and/or make notes. When I read a book or article, I like to flag what is most of interest to me and ideas I want to come back to.
I took this approach when reading Simpler Living, Compassionate Life for the first time years ago. If you saw my copy of the book, it is marked up with a lot of yellow highlighting.
I am a fairly prolific highlighter, so I cannot share with you everything I flagged when reading the book. But I'd like to share with you some passages that particularly got my attention and made an impression on me. They are sort of a synopsis of not just this one particular book, but of the things that drew me to the concept of voluntary simplicity more generally.
My hope is that these random passages will whet your appetite and you'll read this amazing book as well. In fact, I include page numbers so you can read these passage in their full context.
And in doing so, maybe you'll find your own passages in the book that impact you in some meaningful way. Enjoy!
p. 26 "Americans comprise only 5% of the world's population but consume 30% of its resources."
p. 27 "While voluntary poverty can be a beautiful offering of one's life, poverty itself can crush not only the body but the spirit as well."
p. 27 "Perhaps the prophetic word that simple living has to offer materialism centers around justice and freedom: justice that can be lived through reduced consumption and more equitable distribution of the earth's finite resources, and acting justly toward the rest of creation: freedom that allows each of us to move from life-draining acquisitiveness toward a joyful, generous spirit that recognizes the worth of all God's creatures."
p. 27 "But in our driven busyness we do not take time to listen. We no longer know who we are and the 'still, small voice' is lost in the cacophony of voices urging us on to the next task. Lacking the ability to listen and follow God's voice and our own inner direction, we become increasingly susceptible to the marketing of the good life. We lose touch with the understanding that who we are is larger than simply what we do. Into this hyper-productive life walks simplicity. Simplicity requires us to slow down, to consider how our lives reflect who we are and what we value. . . If the abundant life is more than just consuming, it is also more than just producing."
p. 34 "There is no doubt that some purchases permanently enhance our lives. But how much of what we consume merely keeps us moving on a stationary treadmill? The problem with the treadmill is not only that it is stationary, but also that we have to work long hours to stay on it... the consumerist treadmill and long hour jobs have combined to form an insidious cycle of 'work-and-spend.' Employers ask for long hours. The pay creates a high level of consumption. People buy houses and go into debt; luxuries become necessities; Smiths keep up with Joneses. . . Capitalism has brought a dramatically increased standard of living, but at the cost of a much more demanding worklife."
p. 35 "The juggling act between job and family is another problem area. Half the population now says they have too little time for their families. The problem is particularly acute for women: in one study, half of all employed mothers reported it caused either 'a lot' or an 'extreme' level of stress. The same proportion feel that 'when I'm at home I try to make up to my family for being away at work, and as a result I rarely have any time for myself.' This stress has placed tremendous burdens on marriages. Two-earner couples have less time together, which researchers have found reduces the happiness and satisfaction of a marriage. These couples often just don't have enough time to talk to each other."
p. 36 "Serious as these problems are, the most alarming development may be the effect of the work explosion on the care of children. According to economist Sylvia Hewlett, 'child neglect has become endemic in our society.' A major problem is that children are increasingly left alone, to fend for themselves while their parents are at work. . . Hewlett links the 'parenting deficit' to a variety of problems plaguing our country's youth: poor performance in school, mental problems, drug and alcohol use, and teen suicide. According to another expert, kids are being 'cheated out of childhood. . . There is a sense that adults don't care about them."
p. 38 "In the past I read books that told me how to get more done during the day, how to find that extra hour so you could study French or learn photography. I would try to do as many things as I could at one time. Now I focus on doing less and slowing down. I try to stop rushing, to practice mindfulness, to practice meditation. I keep working at it, but still I have that nagging feeling--hurry, hurry."
p. 53 "Our hard and very urgent task is to realize that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude. How differently we would live if we always sensed that the nature around us is full of desire to tell us the great story of God's love, to which it points."
p. 67 "All of us struggle with the place of money in our lives. There are no easy answers. Yet whether rich or poor, by either American or global standards, money is surely one of our culture's most prevalent and powerful idols: promising that which it cannot finally deliver."
p. 67 "Idolatry, whatever its object, represents the enshrinement of any other person or thing in the very place of God. Idolatry embraces some person or thing, instead of God, as the source and rationalization of the moral significance of this life in the world for, at least, the idolater, though not, necessarily, for anybody else at all."
p. 75 "Now consider our economic system (the 'Big Economy,' Rasmussen, p. 111), the dominant global economy as it has developed in Western culture (and spread through the world). Rather than a circle, we might envision a line. At one end, capital, labor, and natural resources are input. Along the way 'things' are produced, advertising creates a desire for those things, which we then consume. Along the way, some people reap profits. But, also along the way, a lot of waste is produced. . . The Big Economy hopes that the Great Economy will somehow assimilate all waste, a hope we now know is futile; the waste generated each year in the United States would fill a convoy of 10-ton garbage trucks 145,000 miles long--over halfway to the moon. . . All inputs (including capital and labor, which are also ultimately dependent on a healthy world) come from the Great Economy, and all wastes return to it. Yet the Big Economy refers to its effects on the natural world as 'externalities;' that is, these effects are not taken into account within our monetary economy. Examples of externalities include water pollution, soil erosion, ozone depletion and toxic waste. . . These externalities profoundly affect people and places--in our own backyards and around the world. . . Although economic status plays an important role in the location of toxic waste sites, race is the leading factor."
p. 78 "Worldwide, 40,000 children die of hunger-related disease or malnutrition every day. If we Americans ate 10 percent less meat (it takes 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of red meat), enough grain would be saved to more than feed those children (Robbins and Patton, May All Be Fed, chapter 2)."
p. 83 "Adam Smith did not write as a Calvinist theologian, but his view of the human being is not far removed from that of many Scottish Calvinist of his day. They, too, were suspicious of expecting too much from human sympathy or love. They recognized with Smith that most people's actions were basically selfish."
p. 88 " We have learned not to impose simple ideals naively on complex situations but to analyze them thoroughly and then find ways to move toward Christian goals within them. . . In our opposition to individualism and to nationalism, we affirm that we as individuals need one another and that nations, too, need one another, as we all need God."
p. 91 "American children under the age of 13 have more spending money--$230 a year--than the 300 million poorest people in the world."
p. 91 "The richest billion people in the world have created a form of civilization so acquisitive and profligate that the planet is in danger. The lifestyle of this top echelon--the car drivers, beef eaters, soda drinkers, and throwaway consumers--constitutes an ecological threat unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. . . Ironically, abundance has not even made people terribly happy. In the United States, repeated opinion polls of people's sense of well-being show that no more Americans are satisfied with their lot now than they were in 1957. Despite phenomenal growth in consumption, the list of wants has grown faster still. Of course, the other extreme from overconsumption--poverty--is not solution to environmental or human problems: it is infinitely worse for people and equally bad for the environment. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert. If environmental decline results when people have either too little or too much, we must ask ourselves: How much is enough?"
p. 97 "The basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: Each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations."
p. 100 "It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy should be cheap and plentiful."
p. 119 "To live eschatologically in this sense is not simply to enjoy hopeful images from time to time. The hope for the Kingdom freed early Christians from concern for success or security in the present order. . . When God is understood as omnipotent, Christians have an assureance of ultimate success for their causes regardless of the most immediate outcome of the efforts. But, today, we do not perceive God as forcing divine decisions upon the world."
p. 127 "One of the most often-mentioned ways to provide more work is to reduce the work week and spread jobs around. This can be done in a way that both employees and employers benefit. For instance, some companies find that people will accept a lower salary if their hourly wage goes up. Since productivity tends to rise when people work shorter hours, both the people and the company would benefit: there would be higher productivity for the company and a higher hourly wage for the people."
p. 133 "The aim of sufficiency is that everyone shall have enough of the things that are needed for a reasonably secure and fulfilling life. . . We are concerned first about basic needs: pure water, food and nutrition, clothing, shelter, health care, literacy and some kind of meaningful work to do. . . Individuals do not have identical requirements and likings in order to be happy. But what any one person may include in the idea of what is sufficient for himself or herself is necessarily limited by the ideas of others about their sufficiency and the recognition that some minimal sufficiency for everyone takes precedence--whenever a choice is necessary--over anyone's right to enjoy a surplus."
p. 137 "Consumerism itself is the substitute, a most unsatisfactory, through addictive, substitute for that which makes human life meaningful and fulfilling--loving, caring relationships with one another, in which we accept and affirm our dependence on one another, and all the ways in which we may free each other for everything true and good and creative that each of us has in himself or herself to be or to become. In short, consumerism is a substitute for community. The abundance to which Jesus pointed was explicitly not the abundance of possessions. It was the abundance of the restored relationship, the God-relationship. It was the freedom to enjoy the community--the giving-and-receiving relationship with one another--for which we were created."
p. 146 "The radical critics of capitalism and promoters of Spartan rusticity among the advocates of the simple life would be well advised to acknowledge that material progress and urban life can frequently be compatible with spiritual, moral, or intellectual concerns."
p. 147 "Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar."
p. 148 "One of Gandhi's American friends once confessed to the Indian leader that it was easy and liberating for him to discard most of the superfluous clutter in his life and his household, but he could not part with his large collection of books. 'Then don't give them up,' Gandhi replied. 'As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you.' This means that simplicity is indeed more a state of mind than a particular standard of living."
p. 155 "Our freedom from sin allows us to serve others. Before, all our serving was for our benefit, a means to somehow get right with God. Only because the grace of God has been showered upon us are we enabled to give that same grace to others."
p. 167 "Consumption patterns of the 'Northern' countries and the 'Western' countries are obscene by global standards, yet there is no apparent end in sight to the guttony. . .Nevertheless, the underlying economic logic of an economy based on unlimited growth remains largely unchallenged in public discourse. . . The reasons for this have as much to do with arguments about social justice as they do with shameless consumerism. After all, growth has become the only means that late capitalism has devised to cope with the increasingly evident problem of inequity."
p. 182 "We are trapped in a maze of competing attachments. One moment we make decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others will think of us. We have no unity or focus around which our lives are oriented. Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insance attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.' Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. . . Hoarding we call prudence."
I've realized over the years that I'm a fairly kinesthetic learner. I cannot just sit still and read. To take in what I'm reading, I have to underline, highlight and/or make notes. When I read a book or article, I like to flag what is most of interest to me and ideas I want to come back to.
I took this approach when reading Simpler Living, Compassionate Life for the first time years ago. If you saw my copy of the book, it is marked up with a lot of yellow highlighting.
I am a fairly prolific highlighter, so I cannot share with you everything I flagged when reading the book. But I'd like to share with you some passages that particularly got my attention and made an impression on me. They are sort of a synopsis of not just this one particular book, but of the things that drew me to the concept of voluntary simplicity more generally.
My hope is that these random passages will whet your appetite and you'll read this amazing book as well. In fact, I include page numbers so you can read these passage in their full context.
And in doing so, maybe you'll find your own passages in the book that impact you in some meaningful way. Enjoy!
p. 26 "Americans comprise only 5% of the world's population but consume 30% of its resources."
p. 27 "While voluntary poverty can be a beautiful offering of one's life, poverty itself can crush not only the body but the spirit as well."
p. 27 "Perhaps the prophetic word that simple living has to offer materialism centers around justice and freedom: justice that can be lived through reduced consumption and more equitable distribution of the earth's finite resources, and acting justly toward the rest of creation: freedom that allows each of us to move from life-draining acquisitiveness toward a joyful, generous spirit that recognizes the worth of all God's creatures."
p. 27 "But in our driven busyness we do not take time to listen. We no longer know who we are and the 'still, small voice' is lost in the cacophony of voices urging us on to the next task. Lacking the ability to listen and follow God's voice and our own inner direction, we become increasingly susceptible to the marketing of the good life. We lose touch with the understanding that who we are is larger than simply what we do. Into this hyper-productive life walks simplicity. Simplicity requires us to slow down, to consider how our lives reflect who we are and what we value. . . If the abundant life is more than just consuming, it is also more than just producing."
p. 34 "There is no doubt that some purchases permanently enhance our lives. But how much of what we consume merely keeps us moving on a stationary treadmill? The problem with the treadmill is not only that it is stationary, but also that we have to work long hours to stay on it... the consumerist treadmill and long hour jobs have combined to form an insidious cycle of 'work-and-spend.' Employers ask for long hours. The pay creates a high level of consumption. People buy houses and go into debt; luxuries become necessities; Smiths keep up with Joneses. . . Capitalism has brought a dramatically increased standard of living, but at the cost of a much more demanding worklife."
p. 35 "The juggling act between job and family is another problem area. Half the population now says they have too little time for their families. The problem is particularly acute for women: in one study, half of all employed mothers reported it caused either 'a lot' or an 'extreme' level of stress. The same proportion feel that 'when I'm at home I try to make up to my family for being away at work, and as a result I rarely have any time for myself.' This stress has placed tremendous burdens on marriages. Two-earner couples have less time together, which researchers have found reduces the happiness and satisfaction of a marriage. These couples often just don't have enough time to talk to each other."
p. 36 "Serious as these problems are, the most alarming development may be the effect of the work explosion on the care of children. According to economist Sylvia Hewlett, 'child neglect has become endemic in our society.' A major problem is that children are increasingly left alone, to fend for themselves while their parents are at work. . . Hewlett links the 'parenting deficit' to a variety of problems plaguing our country's youth: poor performance in school, mental problems, drug and alcohol use, and teen suicide. According to another expert, kids are being 'cheated out of childhood. . . There is a sense that adults don't care about them."
p. 38 "In the past I read books that told me how to get more done during the day, how to find that extra hour so you could study French or learn photography. I would try to do as many things as I could at one time. Now I focus on doing less and slowing down. I try to stop rushing, to practice mindfulness, to practice meditation. I keep working at it, but still I have that nagging feeling--hurry, hurry."
p. 53 "Our hard and very urgent task is to realize that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude. How differently we would live if we always sensed that the nature around us is full of desire to tell us the great story of God's love, to which it points."
p. 67 "All of us struggle with the place of money in our lives. There are no easy answers. Yet whether rich or poor, by either American or global standards, money is surely one of our culture's most prevalent and powerful idols: promising that which it cannot finally deliver."
p. 67 "Idolatry, whatever its object, represents the enshrinement of any other person or thing in the very place of God. Idolatry embraces some person or thing, instead of God, as the source and rationalization of the moral significance of this life in the world for, at least, the idolater, though not, necessarily, for anybody else at all."
p. 75 "Now consider our economic system (the 'Big Economy,' Rasmussen, p. 111), the dominant global economy as it has developed in Western culture (and spread through the world). Rather than a circle, we might envision a line. At one end, capital, labor, and natural resources are input. Along the way 'things' are produced, advertising creates a desire for those things, which we then consume. Along the way, some people reap profits. But, also along the way, a lot of waste is produced. . . The Big Economy hopes that the Great Economy will somehow assimilate all waste, a hope we now know is futile; the waste generated each year in the United States would fill a convoy of 10-ton garbage trucks 145,000 miles long--over halfway to the moon. . . All inputs (including capital and labor, which are also ultimately dependent on a healthy world) come from the Great Economy, and all wastes return to it. Yet the Big Economy refers to its effects on the natural world as 'externalities;' that is, these effects are not taken into account within our monetary economy. Examples of externalities include water pollution, soil erosion, ozone depletion and toxic waste. . . These externalities profoundly affect people and places--in our own backyards and around the world. . . Although economic status plays an important role in the location of toxic waste sites, race is the leading factor."
p. 78 "Worldwide, 40,000 children die of hunger-related disease or malnutrition every day. If we Americans ate 10 percent less meat (it takes 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of red meat), enough grain would be saved to more than feed those children (Robbins and Patton, May All Be Fed, chapter 2)."
p. 83 "Adam Smith did not write as a Calvinist theologian, but his view of the human being is not far removed from that of many Scottish Calvinist of his day. They, too, were suspicious of expecting too much from human sympathy or love. They recognized with Smith that most people's actions were basically selfish."
p. 88 " We have learned not to impose simple ideals naively on complex situations but to analyze them thoroughly and then find ways to move toward Christian goals within them. . . In our opposition to individualism and to nationalism, we affirm that we as individuals need one another and that nations, too, need one another, as we all need God."
p. 91 "American children under the age of 13 have more spending money--$230 a year--than the 300 million poorest people in the world."
p. 91 "The richest billion people in the world have created a form of civilization so acquisitive and profligate that the planet is in danger. The lifestyle of this top echelon--the car drivers, beef eaters, soda drinkers, and throwaway consumers--constitutes an ecological threat unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. . . Ironically, abundance has not even made people terribly happy. In the United States, repeated opinion polls of people's sense of well-being show that no more Americans are satisfied with their lot now than they were in 1957. Despite phenomenal growth in consumption, the list of wants has grown faster still. Of course, the other extreme from overconsumption--poverty--is not solution to environmental or human problems: it is infinitely worse for people and equally bad for the environment. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert. If environmental decline results when people have either too little or too much, we must ask ourselves: How much is enough?"
p. 97 "The basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: Each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations."
p. 100 "It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy should be cheap and plentiful."
p. 119 "To live eschatologically in this sense is not simply to enjoy hopeful images from time to time. The hope for the Kingdom freed early Christians from concern for success or security in the present order. . . When God is understood as omnipotent, Christians have an assureance of ultimate success for their causes regardless of the most immediate outcome of the efforts. But, today, we do not perceive God as forcing divine decisions upon the world."
p. 127 "One of the most often-mentioned ways to provide more work is to reduce the work week and spread jobs around. This can be done in a way that both employees and employers benefit. For instance, some companies find that people will accept a lower salary if their hourly wage goes up. Since productivity tends to rise when people work shorter hours, both the people and the company would benefit: there would be higher productivity for the company and a higher hourly wage for the people."
p. 133 "The aim of sufficiency is that everyone shall have enough of the things that are needed for a reasonably secure and fulfilling life. . . We are concerned first about basic needs: pure water, food and nutrition, clothing, shelter, health care, literacy and some kind of meaningful work to do. . . Individuals do not have identical requirements and likings in order to be happy. But what any one person may include in the idea of what is sufficient for himself or herself is necessarily limited by the ideas of others about their sufficiency and the recognition that some minimal sufficiency for everyone takes precedence--whenever a choice is necessary--over anyone's right to enjoy a surplus."
p. 137 "Consumerism itself is the substitute, a most unsatisfactory, through addictive, substitute for that which makes human life meaningful and fulfilling--loving, caring relationships with one another, in which we accept and affirm our dependence on one another, and all the ways in which we may free each other for everything true and good and creative that each of us has in himself or herself to be or to become. In short, consumerism is a substitute for community. The abundance to which Jesus pointed was explicitly not the abundance of possessions. It was the abundance of the restored relationship, the God-relationship. It was the freedom to enjoy the community--the giving-and-receiving relationship with one another--for which we were created."
p. 146 "The radical critics of capitalism and promoters of Spartan rusticity among the advocates of the simple life would be well advised to acknowledge that material progress and urban life can frequently be compatible with spiritual, moral, or intellectual concerns."
p. 147 "Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar."
p. 148 "One of Gandhi's American friends once confessed to the Indian leader that it was easy and liberating for him to discard most of the superfluous clutter in his life and his household, but he could not part with his large collection of books. 'Then don't give them up,' Gandhi replied. 'As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you.' This means that simplicity is indeed more a state of mind than a particular standard of living."
p. 155 "Our freedom from sin allows us to serve others. Before, all our serving was for our benefit, a means to somehow get right with God. Only because the grace of God has been showered upon us are we enabled to give that same grace to others."
p. 167 "Consumption patterns of the 'Northern' countries and the 'Western' countries are obscene by global standards, yet there is no apparent end in sight to the guttony. . .Nevertheless, the underlying economic logic of an economy based on unlimited growth remains largely unchallenged in public discourse. . . The reasons for this have as much to do with arguments about social justice as they do with shameless consumerism. After all, growth has become the only means that late capitalism has devised to cope with the increasingly evident problem of inequity."
p. 182 "We are trapped in a maze of competing attachments. One moment we make decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others will think of us. We have no unity or focus around which our lives are oriented. Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insance attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.' Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. . . Hoarding we call prudence."
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Simply Sunday #8
Hello! Hope you are having a stupendous Sunday.
Here are a few things I did this week in my journey towards voluntary simplicity:
(1) Went to the drive-in movies with our family. We just recently found out there is actually a drive-in movie theater in our metropolitan area, and it is not that far away. Tuesday is "family night" where the price of admission is a little lower than normal. But frankly it is a pretty good deal all week for families. Parents pay about what they'd pay at a regular theater, but kids are just a dollar each and you are welcome to bring your own food, which everyone does. And we even got a double feature of kid films! We brought our camping chairs and a picnic. What a fun evening! The weather is perfect right now in our neck of the woods. Watching movies under the stars with my lovies while munching on treats. Who could ask for more?!
(2) Cleaned out a dresser. We have an antique-ish dresser in our hallway that we inherited from my husband's grandma. (I say "antique-ish" because it is old, but not valuable in a monetary sense. To me, the term "antique" sounds like something in a museum that needs to be insured. Grandma's dresser ain't that!) Unfortunately, this inherited dresser had become a junk drawer where my dear husband has hid things he didn't know where else to put. I am happy to announce that I've cleaned out all the drawers in that dresser. I've put two drawers to good use, and am now contemplating the best use of the others. Yeah, organization and de-cluttering!
(3) Removed all purses from my husband's closet. In our bedroom, there are two closets. Because women have societally imposed expectations with regard to how they dress and I was working in a professional environment, I had a lot more clothes than I would have ordinarily wanted to own. As a result of all this, for the past few years, I unfortunately occupied BOTH of the closets in our bedroom, and my husband used a small closet in the guest room. Since leaving my paid gig, however, I've given a lot of my professional clothes away. And I have more to sort through as I get time. So, even though this paring down of my wardrobe is still a work in progress, for a couple weeks now my husband has been able to share one of the closets in our bedroom with me. Rome was not built in a day--and unless you are Nero, it is not deconstructed in a day either! I keep plugging away and this week I was able to give away more clothes and reorganize my main closet to take my purses out of the closet I share with my husband. They are now on a shelf in my main closet. He now gets 100% of the shelving space in our shared closet. Progress!
Don't tell my husband, but my eventual goal is that I will be down to one closet and he can have one closet fully to himself. To be honest, voluntary simplicity is only part of the motivation. He is rather a disorganized mess, so sharing a closet is stressful!
Multiple closets, antique-ish dresser, lots of clothes, the plural of "purse." This may not sound like true voluntary simplicity. But remember there is the ideal and then there is reality. I'm not Mahatma Gandhi weaving my own cloth. I'm a suburban mom in the 21st century in the U.S. So, I share this kind of mundane stuff as an encouragement to you. Voluntary simplicity is a journey. It is not an all or nothing proposition. You don't have to move to the country, raise all your own food and live off the grid. Just start where you are now. Everything counts. All progress should be celebrated.
Here are a few things I did this week in my journey towards voluntary simplicity:
(1) Went to the drive-in movies with our family. We just recently found out there is actually a drive-in movie theater in our metropolitan area, and it is not that far away. Tuesday is "family night" where the price of admission is a little lower than normal. But frankly it is a pretty good deal all week for families. Parents pay about what they'd pay at a regular theater, but kids are just a dollar each and you are welcome to bring your own food, which everyone does. And we even got a double feature of kid films! We brought our camping chairs and a picnic. What a fun evening! The weather is perfect right now in our neck of the woods. Watching movies under the stars with my lovies while munching on treats. Who could ask for more?!
(2) Cleaned out a dresser. We have an antique-ish dresser in our hallway that we inherited from my husband's grandma. (I say "antique-ish" because it is old, but not valuable in a monetary sense. To me, the term "antique" sounds like something in a museum that needs to be insured. Grandma's dresser ain't that!) Unfortunately, this inherited dresser had become a junk drawer where my dear husband has hid things he didn't know where else to put. I am happy to announce that I've cleaned out all the drawers in that dresser. I've put two drawers to good use, and am now contemplating the best use of the others. Yeah, organization and de-cluttering!
(3) Removed all purses from my husband's closet. In our bedroom, there are two closets. Because women have societally imposed expectations with regard to how they dress and I was working in a professional environment, I had a lot more clothes than I would have ordinarily wanted to own. As a result of all this, for the past few years, I unfortunately occupied BOTH of the closets in our bedroom, and my husband used a small closet in the guest room. Since leaving my paid gig, however, I've given a lot of my professional clothes away. And I have more to sort through as I get time. So, even though this paring down of my wardrobe is still a work in progress, for a couple weeks now my husband has been able to share one of the closets in our bedroom with me. Rome was not built in a day--and unless you are Nero, it is not deconstructed in a day either! I keep plugging away and this week I was able to give away more clothes and reorganize my main closet to take my purses out of the closet I share with my husband. They are now on a shelf in my main closet. He now gets 100% of the shelving space in our shared closet. Progress!
Don't tell my husband, but my eventual goal is that I will be down to one closet and he can have one closet fully to himself. To be honest, voluntary simplicity is only part of the motivation. He is rather a disorganized mess, so sharing a closet is stressful!
Multiple closets, antique-ish dresser, lots of clothes, the plural of "purse." This may not sound like true voluntary simplicity. But remember there is the ideal and then there is reality. I'm not Mahatma Gandhi weaving my own cloth. I'm a suburban mom in the 21st century in the U.S. So, I share this kind of mundane stuff as an encouragement to you. Voluntary simplicity is a journey. It is not an all or nothing proposition. You don't have to move to the country, raise all your own food and live off the grid. Just start where you are now. Everything counts. All progress should be celebrated.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part II: Evy McDonald's Essay)
I was plugging along reading Simpler Living, Compassionate Life as a daily devotional. The essays and excerpts were so varied, it was really hit or miss for me. But the essay that first (and most) gave me an "a-ha" moment was Evy McDonald's. It was entitled "Spending Money as if Life Really Matters." I really encourage you to take a read.
The introductory bio on Ms. McDonald described her as a former nurse who had gone on to found the New Road Map Foundation, which focuses on educating and enabling people to "shift to low-consumption, high-fulfillment lifestyles." In that mission, they rely primarily on Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's book Your Money or Your Life. I had never heard of that book until reading Ms. McDonald's essay, but afterwards I couldn't wait to read it and it eventually had a real impact on my thinking. But in the meantime, Ms. McDonald's essay was a great introduction to the concepts in that book and really wetted my appetite.
A number of points in Ms. McDonald's essay really caught my attention.
First, she observed, "Though history shows that there was a constant tension between material acquisition and spiritual transcendence, most households until the twentieth century were not consumers but producers and manufacturers. People grew their own food, built their own homes, barns and furniture, poured their own candles and sewed their own clothes." This passage really opened my eyes. At the time, I was so in the trenches in my career, I had become rather myopic. It may sound silly but it never occurred to me that the lifestyle I was living (and that most folks in my social circles were living) was a fairly modern invention. On some level, I guess I had assumed that through the centuries, people had always been consumers. It was just that we had consumed less and what we had consumed was different in the olden days. Even though I had read books like Little House on the Prairie as a kid, I guess I had lost sight that that lifestyle was not unique to families whose patriarch yanked them out of civilization to homestead on the frontier. And it began to dawn on me that if the consumption lifestyle has not always been, maybe it will not always be. Just maybe there might be another way to live our precious time on this planet--even if we live in large metropolitan areas and have jobs.
Second, Ms. McDonald described that prior to the Great Depression, "social innovators were planning self-sufficient communities that would give people a sense of belonging and integrate urban and rural towns." She cites David Shi's book The Simple Life in this description. However, she explains that with the advent of the economic collapse of the Great Depression, these plans fell apart. Then once the economy recovered, "[l]eading economists felt that perpetual economic growth was possible." From there, a "theology of consumption began to invade our culture--and our churches. Slowly, almost imperceptively, we wandered away from the foundational teachings of Jesus--sharing our wealth, identifying with the marginalized, living a life of grateful stewardship--and began to identify our worth with how much money we made or how many possessions we owned."
Wow! I really want to read Mr. Shi's book. Those pre-Depression communities of self-sufficiency sounded exciting. I've never heard of those. With our hussle bussle modern lives, most of us have really lost a sense of community. We don't even know our neighbors in more than a superficial way most of the time.
But I had definitely heard of and been impacted by the belief in "perpetual economic growth" and "theology of consumption." At the time, my husband and I worked for publicly traded companies fairly obsessed with their stock price. Everyone was always wanting to show more revenues, more expansion, more everything. Staying the same was not acceptable. Shrinking was catastrophe.
And that thinking about the corporate bottom line infects our thinking in so many other ways. Schools need to increase their number of graduates and the passage by their students of key tests. Nonprofits need to show they are helping more people and increasing grants. We are often judged professionally not by how well we do but by how much improvement we can prove. But in the back of my mind, when I had a moment to breath, I would sometimes wonder whether it was always possible to grow in tangible ways. At some point, isn't growth more difficult to achieve? Is such growth even valuable if you've gotten so big and it takes so much effort to grow a little more?
And the theology of consumption is not just a secular idea. When I was young, I didn't like going to church. There were a lot of reasons, but one was that church seemed to often be a chance for people to show off their fancy clothes. I never had a lot of clothes, fancy or otherwise. This was a distraction for me, and I never understood how showing off one's clothes squared with Jesus's teaching. I couldn't reconcile the two, and sadly it drove me away from church for many years.
It continues today to some extent. My husband and I have felt judged even by clergy for not dressing more elegantly. We don't wear ripped jeans and flip flops, but we also don't wear suits. One Christmas, a deacon approached our family and to our horror asked if one (but not both) of our children would like to help the pastor at one point in the service because the child she was inviting "was dressed." What she meant was that our invited child had taken it upon herself to wear her fanciest dress, while our other child was wearing a more modest outfit of slacks and a solid cotton shirt. Apparently, the uninvited child wasn't fancy enough to be seen at the front of the church. We were so disappointed in this mentality!
And it is not just clothes. We are a culture that still judges each other based on other possessions--what kind of car, which electronics, what kind of house, what kind of furniture. But Ms. McDonald notes how contrary that is to Jesus's teachings. How convicting!
Later, she had a line that caught my attention. She notes that "our affluence and consumption [have not] given us more fulfilling, happier and just ways of living" and instead "[t]oday, people admit to feeling stressed and tired with little time to care for and nuture relationships, family, friends or the environment." She notes that researchers have indicated this trend increased from the 1970s to now. It left us "[s]atiated at the physical level, yet starved at the spiritual level." These words really hit home. Why was I working so hard? It was true that I had more financial cushion than I'd ever had in my life. But money was not the big motivator to me. My husband and I didn't particularly like buying things. We did enjoy traveling. And our corporate jobs were giving us the money to go places. But they also gave us so few vacation days that we frankly had little time to go anywhere.
Quoting Marcus Borg in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, she states: "Our culture's secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the spirit. . . It looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what I call the three A's--Achievement, Affluence and Appearance." Mr. Borg's book is a great one, but even if you aren't a person of faith, it is easy to see the emptiness and futility of a life built on those three A's. Those values are really pointless. They aren't sustainable or lasting.
The part of the essay that particularly got my attention was when Ms. McDonald described how her "[w]ork was the center of her life" until a particular day that changed her life. She received a devastating medical report and was advised she would probably die within a year. Because of her health condition, she was rapidly replaced at work because her manager did not think she would still be able to keep up with such a demanding job. She wrote, "I had lost the job that gave me my identity, my purpose in life and my sense of self-worth, and I had been told that I was going to die." To add insult to injury, she then found out her home had been burglarized and most of her worldly possessions were gone. Out of the blue, in rapid succession, everything was taken away--her future, her career and her things.
She described that God was the only place to turn, but she painfully realized that she had not been living the life she had professed: "God only existed for me at times of crisis or convenience." She asked herself whom she wanted to be when she died and the answer came to her: "I wanted to be a person who lived her values, understood what service was about and could love herself enough to accept God's love and love her neighbor." She went on to explain that to make that happen, "[m]y self-centered and unhealthy relationship with money was a logical place to start learning how to live my values." This led her to accept a friend's invitation to attend a seminar by Joe Dominguez.
She summarized that she had two main takeaways from the seminar. The first was "identifying how much is enough" and the second was "understanding the true definition of money." Ms. McDonald went on to elaborate that per Joe Dominguez "enough" is "having our survival needs met (food, clothing, shelter), having possessions that bring joy and comfort and even having those few special luxuries that add to the quality of our life." She explains that her definition of money had previously been "power, prestige, status and a way to identify where I stood in relation to other people of my profession," but Mr. Dominguez defined it in a completely different way: "Money is something for which you trade your life energy--your time." To make this definition more comprehensible, Ms. McDonald elaborated:
That one paragraph was a revelation (and a revolution!) to me. I did some computations to figure out my hourly "wage" though I was a salaried employee. I then used that number to think about how many hours of my life I had given up for various purchases I had made. That gave me a whole new way to look at how I was spending my life and whether various purchases were a good use of my life energy. We only have a finite amount of time in this life. None of us knows how much. We cannot squander our lives or put off living until retirement.
Ms. McDonald's experience rang true to me on so many levels. I too was working crazy hours. And around the time I read her essay, I had had some health scares of my own. Things had turned out well, but there were some nervous times after initial doctors' reports that made me wonder if I was not long for this world. That kind of experience is scary and stressful, but it is also valuable in helping you put things in perspective!
I loved how Ms. McDonald ended her essay:
Aren't those beautiful words? I hope they will be a joy and a blessing to you.
The introductory bio on Ms. McDonald described her as a former nurse who had gone on to found the New Road Map Foundation, which focuses on educating and enabling people to "shift to low-consumption, high-fulfillment lifestyles." In that mission, they rely primarily on Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's book Your Money or Your Life. I had never heard of that book until reading Ms. McDonald's essay, but afterwards I couldn't wait to read it and it eventually had a real impact on my thinking. But in the meantime, Ms. McDonald's essay was a great introduction to the concepts in that book and really wetted my appetite.
A number of points in Ms. McDonald's essay really caught my attention.
First, she observed, "Though history shows that there was a constant tension between material acquisition and spiritual transcendence, most households until the twentieth century were not consumers but producers and manufacturers. People grew their own food, built their own homes, barns and furniture, poured their own candles and sewed their own clothes." This passage really opened my eyes. At the time, I was so in the trenches in my career, I had become rather myopic. It may sound silly but it never occurred to me that the lifestyle I was living (and that most folks in my social circles were living) was a fairly modern invention. On some level, I guess I had assumed that through the centuries, people had always been consumers. It was just that we had consumed less and what we had consumed was different in the olden days. Even though I had read books like Little House on the Prairie as a kid, I guess I had lost sight that that lifestyle was not unique to families whose patriarch yanked them out of civilization to homestead on the frontier. And it began to dawn on me that if the consumption lifestyle has not always been, maybe it will not always be. Just maybe there might be another way to live our precious time on this planet--even if we live in large metropolitan areas and have jobs.
Second, Ms. McDonald described that prior to the Great Depression, "social innovators were planning self-sufficient communities that would give people a sense of belonging and integrate urban and rural towns." She cites David Shi's book The Simple Life in this description. However, she explains that with the advent of the economic collapse of the Great Depression, these plans fell apart. Then once the economy recovered, "[l]eading economists felt that perpetual economic growth was possible." From there, a "theology of consumption began to invade our culture--and our churches. Slowly, almost imperceptively, we wandered away from the foundational teachings of Jesus--sharing our wealth, identifying with the marginalized, living a life of grateful stewardship--and began to identify our worth with how much money we made or how many possessions we owned."
Wow! I really want to read Mr. Shi's book. Those pre-Depression communities of self-sufficiency sounded exciting. I've never heard of those. With our hussle bussle modern lives, most of us have really lost a sense of community. We don't even know our neighbors in more than a superficial way most of the time.
But I had definitely heard of and been impacted by the belief in "perpetual economic growth" and "theology of consumption." At the time, my husband and I worked for publicly traded companies fairly obsessed with their stock price. Everyone was always wanting to show more revenues, more expansion, more everything. Staying the same was not acceptable. Shrinking was catastrophe.
And that thinking about the corporate bottom line infects our thinking in so many other ways. Schools need to increase their number of graduates and the passage by their students of key tests. Nonprofits need to show they are helping more people and increasing grants. We are often judged professionally not by how well we do but by how much improvement we can prove. But in the back of my mind, when I had a moment to breath, I would sometimes wonder whether it was always possible to grow in tangible ways. At some point, isn't growth more difficult to achieve? Is such growth even valuable if you've gotten so big and it takes so much effort to grow a little more?
And the theology of consumption is not just a secular idea. When I was young, I didn't like going to church. There were a lot of reasons, but one was that church seemed to often be a chance for people to show off their fancy clothes. I never had a lot of clothes, fancy or otherwise. This was a distraction for me, and I never understood how showing off one's clothes squared with Jesus's teaching. I couldn't reconcile the two, and sadly it drove me away from church for many years.
It continues today to some extent. My husband and I have felt judged even by clergy for not dressing more elegantly. We don't wear ripped jeans and flip flops, but we also don't wear suits. One Christmas, a deacon approached our family and to our horror asked if one (but not both) of our children would like to help the pastor at one point in the service because the child she was inviting "was dressed." What she meant was that our invited child had taken it upon herself to wear her fanciest dress, while our other child was wearing a more modest outfit of slacks and a solid cotton shirt. Apparently, the uninvited child wasn't fancy enough to be seen at the front of the church. We were so disappointed in this mentality!
And it is not just clothes. We are a culture that still judges each other based on other possessions--what kind of car, which electronics, what kind of house, what kind of furniture. But Ms. McDonald notes how contrary that is to Jesus's teachings. How convicting!
Later, she had a line that caught my attention. She notes that "our affluence and consumption [have not] given us more fulfilling, happier and just ways of living" and instead "[t]oday, people admit to feeling stressed and tired with little time to care for and nuture relationships, family, friends or the environment." She notes that researchers have indicated this trend increased from the 1970s to now. It left us "[s]atiated at the physical level, yet starved at the spiritual level." These words really hit home. Why was I working so hard? It was true that I had more financial cushion than I'd ever had in my life. But money was not the big motivator to me. My husband and I didn't particularly like buying things. We did enjoy traveling. And our corporate jobs were giving us the money to go places. But they also gave us so few vacation days that we frankly had little time to go anywhere.
Quoting Marcus Borg in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, she states: "Our culture's secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the spirit. . . It looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what I call the three A's--Achievement, Affluence and Appearance." Mr. Borg's book is a great one, but even if you aren't a person of faith, it is easy to see the emptiness and futility of a life built on those three A's. Those values are really pointless. They aren't sustainable or lasting.
The part of the essay that particularly got my attention was when Ms. McDonald described how her "[w]ork was the center of her life" until a particular day that changed her life. She received a devastating medical report and was advised she would probably die within a year. Because of her health condition, she was rapidly replaced at work because her manager did not think she would still be able to keep up with such a demanding job. She wrote, "I had lost the job that gave me my identity, my purpose in life and my sense of self-worth, and I had been told that I was going to die." To add insult to injury, she then found out her home had been burglarized and most of her worldly possessions were gone. Out of the blue, in rapid succession, everything was taken away--her future, her career and her things.
She described that God was the only place to turn, but she painfully realized that she had not been living the life she had professed: "God only existed for me at times of crisis or convenience." She asked herself whom she wanted to be when she died and the answer came to her: "I wanted to be a person who lived her values, understood what service was about and could love herself enough to accept God's love and love her neighbor." She went on to explain that to make that happen, "[m]y self-centered and unhealthy relationship with money was a logical place to start learning how to live my values." This led her to accept a friend's invitation to attend a seminar by Joe Dominguez.
She summarized that she had two main takeaways from the seminar. The first was "identifying how much is enough" and the second was "understanding the true definition of money." Ms. McDonald went on to elaborate that per Joe Dominguez "enough" is "having our survival needs met (food, clothing, shelter), having possessions that bring joy and comfort and even having those few special luxuries that add to the quality of our life." She explains that her definition of money had previously been "power, prestige, status and a way to identify where I stood in relation to other people of my profession," but Mr. Dominguez defined it in a completely different way: "Money is something for which you trade your life energy--your time." To make this definition more comprehensible, Ms. McDonald elaborated:
Every purchase could be seen in terms of the number of hours I would need to work to pay for it. The real cost of a $100 blouse, therefore, would be the 20 hours on the job needed to make the money to buy it. Would I receive satisfaction from the blouse equal to 20 hours of my life? I began to apply that question to all my purchases.
That one paragraph was a revelation (and a revolution!) to me. I did some computations to figure out my hourly "wage" though I was a salaried employee. I then used that number to think about how many hours of my life I had given up for various purchases I had made. That gave me a whole new way to look at how I was spending my life and whether various purchases were a good use of my life energy. We only have a finite amount of time in this life. None of us knows how much. We cannot squander our lives or put off living until retirement.
Ms. McDonald's experience rang true to me on so many levels. I too was working crazy hours. And around the time I read her essay, I had had some health scares of my own. Things had turned out well, but there were some nervous times after initial doctors' reports that made me wonder if I was not long for this world. That kind of experience is scary and stressful, but it is also valuable in helping you put things in perspective!
I loved how Ms. McDonald ended her essay:
Gradually my actions became more aligned with my values. I discovered the truth of graceful simplicity: having a few pairs of shoes, not 70; a few blouses, not a hundred; books that are read instead of lining the shelves. Through this process I reclaimed the most precious gift God gave me--the hours of my life--and I could begin to discover how God wanted those hours used. In defining how much was enough for me I found time for serving, reading, watching sunsets, singing, going for a walk with friends, enjoying a concert and listing in silent prayer. In short, a life of immeasurable wealth.
I still consume. We all consume. The critical step is to move from being conspicuous consumers to being conscious consumers.
Discovering what was enough for me allowed me to make that shift. Our task now is to return to a life based on feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, raising healthy loving children, and stewarding and preserving creation. Perhaps then each act of consumption will become a hymn of thanksgiving.
Aren't those beautiful words? I hope they will be a joy and a blessing to you.
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