Living the Simple Life

by Elaine St James

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  This book is dedicated to everyone who wants to live a simpler life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  An Overview

  ONE: The Simple Life 1. What Living the Simple Life Means for Me and Gibbs

  2. Some Other Views of the Simple Life

  3. A “Corporate Yuppie” Approach to Simplifying

  4. A “Cabin in the Woods” Approach to Simple Living

  5. What Does Simple Living Mean to You?

  6. The Things That Complicate Our Lives

  7. What We Can Eliminate

  8. Remember a Time When You Were Truly Happy

  9. Be Willing to Change the Way You Play the Game

  10. You Can Have a Simpler Job

  11. You Can Live a Simpler Life

  TWO: Getting Started 12. A First Step

  13. Ten Ways to Free Up an Hour or More Each Day for the Next Thirty Days, So You Can Start Thinking about How to Simplify Your Life

  14. Ten Ways to Free Up Miscellaneous Amounts of Time over the Next Thirty Days, So You Can Start Thinking about How to Simplify Your Life

  15. Five Ways to Free Up an Entire Day or More over the Next Thirty Days, So You Can Start Thinking about How to Simplify Your Life

  16. Escape to a Quiet Spot

  17. What to Take with You

  18. Ask Yourself Some Simple Questions

  19. Set Your Own Pace

  THREE: The Things That Really Matter 20. You May Not Know What Really Matters

  21. Reexamine Your List of Goals

  22. Zero In on Your Top Four or Five Priorities

  23. Remember, There Are Only Twenty-Four Hours in the Day

  24. Remember that Relationships Take Time

  25. Stop Feeding Your Ego

  26. Learn to Make Good Choices

  27. Set Your Time Management System Aside

  FOUR: Some Things to Think About 28. Simplifying Is Often Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

  29. Be Aware of the Pitfalls of Having Extra Time on Your Hands

  30. Get Off Automatic Pilot

  31. Some Ways to Change Gears

  32. Involve Your Children in the Process of Simplifying

  33. When Your Significant Other Doesn’t Want to Simplify

  34. Find a Buddy

  35. How to Deal with People Who Don’t Understand

  36. Find a Happy Medium That Works for You

  37. Keep Asking, “Is This Going to Simplify My Life?”

  FIVE: Getting Rid of Our Stuff 38. Where to Start

  39. Getting Rid of the Stuff Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting Rid of Everything

  40. Look at All the Things You Hold on to Because You Might Need Them Someday

  41. One Knife, One Fork, One Spoon

  42. Start Over Again, and Do It Right

  43. Take a Picture of It

  44. Never Touch a Piece of Mail More than Once

  45. Junk Mail Update

  46. Don’t Even Think about Saving That Piece of Aluminum Foil

  47. Use Your Public Library

  48. Get Some Help

  SIX: Changing Our Consumer Habits 49. The Thirty-Day List

  50. Watch for the Early Warning Signs

  51. Come Up with a Creative Solution Rather than a Buying Solution

  52. Recognize the Point of Diminishing Returns

  53. When You Bring In Something New, Throw Out Something Old

  54. The Simple Souvenir

  55. What to Tell the Grandkids

  56. Put a Moratorium on Shopping

  SEVEN: Learning to Say No 57. The Truly Free Person

  58. One Way to Deal with the Guilt of Saying No

  59. Move Beyond the Guilt

  60. Afraid You’ll Miss Something?

  61. The Reality of the Urgent Request

  62. How to Say No

  63. Saying No in the Workplace

  64. So Why Haven’t You Written Your Book?

  EIGHT: Some Inner Stuff 65. One Reason We’re Craving Simpler Lives

  66. Why We Keep Our Lives So Hectic

  67. Find Your Life’s Work

  68. Giving Back

  NINE: Personal and Household Routines 69. Another Approach to Household Chores

  70. A Simple Weekly Menu Plan

  71. Some Other Possibilities for Simple Meals

  72. A Simple Way to Maintain Your Weight

  73. Dealing with Unwanted Callers

  74. The Simple Answering Machine

  75. The Simple Fireplace

  76. The Simple Bed

  77. Simple Laundering Ideas

  TEN: Lifestyle Issues 78. The Simple Computer

  79. E-Mail

  80. Automatic Payments

  81. Use a Monthly Spending Plan

  82. The Simple Credit Card

  83. Is Quicken Quicker?

  84. The Simple Time Management System

  ELEVEN: Simple Parenting 85. Keep Your Life Simple

  86. Involve Your Kids in the Household Chores

  87. Curtail Their Extracurricular Activities

  88. Monitor Your Children’s Television Viewing

  89. Teach Your Kids How to Handle Money at an Early Age

  90. Set Buying Limits for Toys and Candy and Stick to Them

  91. Set Limits for Your Parents and Other Well-Intentioned Relatives, Too

  92. Cultivate Simple Values

  TWELVE: Simple Wardrobe Ideas for Women 93. Make Your Own Rules

  94. Start with What You Already Have

  95. Limit Your Color Scheme

  96. Figure Out Your Clothing Needs

  97. Find Your Best Silhouette

  98. If You Need Help, Get It

  99. The Simple Purse

  THIRTEEN: Simple Wardrobe Ideas for Men 100. Gibbs’s Ideas for Simple Clothes for Men

  A Final Thought

  Reading List

  References

  Also by Elaine St. James

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Catha Paquette for her perceptive and insightful reading of the manuscript.

  I’d like to thank Marcia Burtt, Joe Phillips, and Pat Rushton for their advice and assistance throughout the process of writing this book.

  I’m grateful for the continuing friendship and support of Judy Babcock, Phil Babcock, Himilce Novas, Tiffany Miller, Marisa Kennedy Miller, Jackie Powers, Carolyn Howe, Meg Torbert, Bev Brennan, Vera Cole, and Jamie O’Toole, and for the presence and guidance of Michael Russer, Stu Sherman, Bob Maloy, Don Foster, Michelle Gysan, Colleen McCarthy Evans, and Maryke White.

  I’d like to thank my agent, Jane Dystel, and my publisher, Bob Miller, for helping me put this book together, and I especially appreciate the wisdom, direction, and encouragement of my editor, Laurie Abkemeier.

  Many thanks to Cynthia Ferguson, Carlie Gnatzig, Erin Webreck, and all the other readers who gave me permission to use their comments in this book, and to everyone who wrote to share their excitement, their enthusiasm, and their ideas for living simpler lives.

  I thank my husband, Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., for
everything, most especially for helping me keep life simple.

  AN OVERVIEW

  I first made the decision to start living a simpler life in the summer of 1990. Prior to that time I had spent roughly twelve years as a real estate investor. I worked ten-hour days buying, refurbishing, managing, and selling investment properties.

  During the previous year I had organized a real estate seminar business, had written a book on real estate investing, and had just completed a national media tour to promote it.

  My life was ruled by a black leather time management system that weighed five pounds and took up half my desk space. My day was driven by the classic prioritizing question, “What is the best use of my time right now?”

  Sometime after college I began, as many of us did, to work at two speeds: faster and fastest. I moved at this pace from six in the morning until seven or eight o’clock at night for more years than I care to count.

  It would probably be accurate to say that I had become a fairly typical urban professional on my own fast track.

  Though my husband, Gibbs, who is older and wiser than I am, was never technically a yuppie, his life was complicated by the fact that he was married to one. And he, too, maintained a full career schedule as a magazine editor, while at the same time writing a series of adventure novels. He was also an active volunteer with various community organizations.

  In addition to our time-consuming careers, we had all the other duties and responsibilities associated with maintaining our lives. Though my two stepsons—who had been with us on weekends for the previous eight years—were now out on their own, we still had four cats and a busy social life.

  The gods must have been smiling on me in the summer of 1990. I stopped for five minutes in the middle of July that year, and in a quiet moment I looked at my time management system as though I were seeing it for the first time. As I went over the list of phone calls I had to make, the people I had to see, the places I had to go, and the things I had to do, all of a sudden a light bulb went on. I realized my life had become too complicated, and I made the decision then and there to start simplifying it.

  I had finally reached a point where keeping up such a hectic pace no longer seemed worth it. It occurred to me that we had, through long hours and a lot of hard work, achieved a modicum of success. We had many of the trappings of the modern lifestyle, but we didn’t have the time, and sometimes not even the energy, to enjoy them. And even worse, we had little time for each other, and practically no time for ourselves.

  A large part of the dissatisfaction for me was that I had never particularly enjoyed my work. I had continued to do it because I hadn’t a clue what else I might be able to do. At that moment it was unthinkable that I could change my career or cut back on my work schedule.

  But I decided there were many other areas where we could begin to cut back. My first objective was to create some breathing space so we could start to figure out how we could do things differently.

  And so we began the process of simplifying. In the first couple of months we eliminated a lot of the clutter that was taking up our time and energy, and we moved to a smaller home. Over the next couple of years we made significant changes in our household routines, our social lives, our entertainment patterns, our civic and volunteer schedules, our financial picture, our personal lives, and eventually even our work lives.

  I then got the idea to write a book on the things we had done to scale back. That book, Simplify Your Life: 100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter, was published in May 1994. It outlines many of the steps Gibbs and I took to simplify.

  In the process of simplifying the outer areas of our lives, we freed up close to thirty hours a week. This gave me the opportunity to begin the daunting prospect of thinking about making some career changes, and also the chance to address some of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual issues that had been bubbling beneath the surface of my fast-paced life, but that I’d seldom taken the time to explore.

  I then decided to write a book that would discuss some of those issues. And so I wrote Inner Simplicity: 100 Ways to Regain Peace and Nourish Your Soul, which was published in May 1995.

  When we first made the decision to simplify, we had no idea that we were in the beginning phase of a major national trend. We simply wanted to get out from under the complications that twelve fast-paced years had generated.

  If you, too, are thinking about making some changes and simplifying, or have already started the process, you’re not alone.

  According to the Trends Research Institute of Rhinebeck, New York, a privately funded organization that forecasts and tracks changes in our culture, simplifying is one of the leading movements of the decade.

  A 1995 nationwide survey of a cross section of Americans revealed that close to 30 percent of the respondents had voluntarily downshifted, and were working fewer hours for less pay so they could spend more time with their families.

  Numerous other surveys have shown that anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of those questioned would be willing to accept a reduction in pay if they could work fewer hours.

  This represents a major nationwide change in personal priorities. It says that many of us have had enough of the fast-paced, hard-working lifestyle that has become “the norm” over the last decade. It says millions of Americans want to live their lives differently.

  The Trends Institute estimates that by the end of the decade, a total of 15 percent of the 77 million baby boomers will have made significant moves toward creating simpler lives, some voluntarily, others involuntarily.

  When I wrote Simplify Your Life, I thought I was writing it for maturing yuppies, who, like Gibbs and me, had been seduced by both the work and the consumer culture in recent years, and who in the process of overdoing it, had begun to lose sight of the important things.

  But based on the letters I receive from readers around the country, it would appear that the desire to simplify crosses most generational, economic, educational, and professional lines.

  I hear from teenagers, single men and women, married couples, retirees, the affluent, the not so affluent, and people from every walk of life—teachers, nurses, computer specialists, actors, journalists, artists, psychotherapists, legislators, lawyers, corporate executives, police officers, students, and media personalities. They are among the millions of Americans who are reducing, voluntarily or otherwise, the hours they spend earning a salary, their housing requirements, and the money they spend on goods and services.

  They, like Gibbs and me, are realizing that they’ve given up too much in the effort to have it all. The primary objective for most of them is to have more time for their own life dreams or for the people they love, and for doing the things they really want to do.

  When you stop to think about it, it’s not surprising that so many of us want to simplify. Never before in the history of mankind have so many people been able to have so much, go so many places, and do so many things. We’ve worn ourselves out trying to have it all.

  And now we’re ready to look at other options.

  In Living the Simple Life, we’ll explore what simple living means to different people and look at what complicates our lives, what we can eliminate, and ways we can play the game differently (Chapter One). I’ll outline some ways to get started, especially for those who feel their lives are too complicated to even think about simplifying (Chapter Two), and for those who may not have stopped long enough recently to get in touch with what really matters to them (Chapter Three).

  I’ll point out some of the things Gibbs and I have learned over the past few years about having more time to call our own, and suggest how to deal with people who don’t understand the desire to simplify (Chapter Four).

  In my experience two major issues complicate our lives above all else. The first is our ongoing battle with consumerism and the stuff we’ve accumulated. As with any problem, awareness is the first step toward resolution. And so I’ll share what we’ve learned about letting go
of a lot of that stuff, and some of the ways we’ve dealt with the media-generated imperative to consume (Chapters Five and Six).

  The second challenge is the tendency for many of us to say yes when we’d like to say no, a habit that affects all areas of our lives. In Chapter Seven, I’ll discuss ways we’ve used to approach this.

  One of the great dichotomies we face is that because our lives are so complicated we don’t have time for ourselves and at the same time we often keep our lives complicated so we won’t have to address some of our inner issues. I’ll talk about this and some ways we can bring our outer and inner lives together in Chapter Eight.

  Each passing year leaves us with personal, household, and lifestyle choices that can either simplify our lives or complicate them even further. In Chapters Nine and Ten, I’ll share my experiences—as well as some readers’ ideas—about these choices.

  There is perhaps no one for whom the problems of consumerism and learning to say no are more important or more challenging than for parents. In Chapter Eleven, I’ll combine my own observations with the wisdom of several readers and an expert or two to outline some ideas for simplifying with children.

  Having no options complicates our lives. Having too many options complicates our lives as well. In Chapter Twelve, I’ll discuss some ways I’ve learned to deal with the clothing options for women. In Chapter Thirteen, Gibbs discusses some things he’s always known about clothing options for men.

  I’ve also included a Reading List, a selection of books that explores some more of the organizational, financial, lifestyle, and work-related questions of living a simpler life.

  An interviewer asked me recently if I was glad I made all these changes and had simplified my life. I said I was, absolutely.

  Then she asked if I’d do it again. I said yes, absolutely. There’s no way I’d ever want my life to be so complicated again.