Living the Simple Life

by Elaine St James

  We take the same route to work, so we don’t have to think about it, and our minds easily fill with a million other things—worries, responsibilities, obligations—on the way to the office.

  While some of our daily work procedures are less automatic than others, there’s still a certain predictability about a lot of the tasks we take on. Mostly we don’t have to analyze it much. We just get through the day so we can hop in the car, and go back home, on automatic.

  Then we fall immediately into our evening schedule, what ever that might be for us: exercise, on automatic; dinner, on automatic; cleanup, on automatic; meetings, on automatic; watching television, on automatic.

  The weekends are frequently the same, though they usually allow for a little more latitude in terms of the routine. But most of us tend to do the same things over and over again, week in and week out.

  Yes, we may vary the specifics somewhat. We may have social or cultural or recreational outings on a regular basis. But those can easily become automatic as well. We tend to go to the same places, see the same people, discuss the same issues.

  There’s a certain comfort in moving through our lives this way. The world sometimes seems unpredictable, and the grooves we establish give us a feeling of order and of being in control. That’s fine as long as the things we’re doing on automatic are the things we really want to be doing. Often they’re not—or maybe they were once but aren’t now—and we haven’t stopped long enough to realize it.

  And paradoxically, living on automatic complicates our lives. Living on automatic is often what makes it possible for us to do all the things we feel we have to do. We squeeze into our days new chores or commitments, adding another errand here, another lunch date there, without considering whether we really have the time to do them, let alone the desire. We just take a deep breath, put our nose back to the grindstone, and add one more item to our list of things to do.

  This is where building some air into our schedule pays off. We can create the time to have a leisurely breakfast with our family, or take the scenic route to the office and enjoy the ride. We can create daily and weekly variations that will make it possible for us to savor special moments throughout our days, throughout our weeks, and throughout our lives.

  Changing gears from time to time makes it possible for us to get into the habit of being aware and alive each moment, or at least for a lot more of our moments. And the more aware we are, the easier it is to get back in control of our lives.

  The process then builds on itself. Each time we become conscious of the fact that we’re doing something we’d rather not be doing, we can make adjustments in our schedule. Gradually we can learn to eliminate those activities and substitute more appealing pursuits.

  31. Some Ways to Change Gears

  Here are some things you might think about doing to get off automatic for a bit:

  Get up earlier and go out to eat with the family at a local breakfast dive. Or pack some muffins, juice, and coffee for a picnic breakfast to watch the sunrise.

  Walk to work. Cycle to work. Take a bus to work. Take a different route to work.

  Walk the kids to school instead of driving them.

  Do your grocery shopping early in the morning before the store gets crowded. Shop at a different store altogether to get a fresh perspective on the items you purchase.

  Meet your spouse and/or kids for lunch in the park. Or leave the office early, pick up a deli basket, and have dinner in the park at sunset.

  Let the housekeeping go this week. Spend the time with your kids instead.

  Let the laundry go this week. Or assign the routine chores to someone else if you can.

  You might come up with a slightly different way of approaching these tasks that would make them simpler for the time being. Recently a friend of mine asked her 10-year-old to make her bed before guests arrived. “Can’t we just close the bedroom door?” her daughter asked.

  There are many circumstances in which just closing the door for the moment would make life simpler.

  Take a vacation day in the middle of the week with your spouse and kids, and go play together. If you can’t take the whole day, take the afternoon off together.

  Exercise at a different time; or do it at a different place; or do it with someone else; or do it alone.

  Unplug your phone for a week. Or change your outgoing message to say you’ll return all calls next week. When I started simplifying some of my office protocol, I was amazed to learn how few phone calls need immediate attention.

  Or sit in a different chair or at a different desk. If possible, work in a different office, or take your work to an empty table in the local library or your favorite café.

  Take some time right now to come up with two or three things you could do this week that would help you break, even for a short while, the patterns that keep you moving through life on automatic, the patterns that keep you trying to do it all.

  32. Involve Your Children in the Process of Simplifying

  If you’ve got kids, your simplification program will obviously be easier to put into place if you include them in the process and enlist their help in making your lives simpler.

  I hear wonderful stories from families who’ve worked together to simplify their lives. I also hear from teenagers who long for simplicity in their world. They’ve seen how all the complications, commitments, and stress have kept their parents from being happy, and they’re determined not to let their lives be that hectic now, or get that overwhelming as they grow older.

  It might be helpful to schedule a family powwow with the stated intention of setting up a program to simplify all your lives. You could start with a discussion designed to help everyone figure out what their own priorities are as well as what the family priorities are. Then take a close look at your schedules to see what kinds of changes you can make to free up time together as a family.

  Assign each child chores in the preparation and cleanup of daily meals, and with the laundry, housekeeping, and yard maintenance. This will give the kids a feeling of responsibility for the family well-being and relieve some of the time pressures of the primary caretaker.

  Not every family member is going to respond favorably to a plan to simplify. The ages of the children and the dynamics within the family will determine, to some extent, how receptive your kids may be to the idea of making some changes and simplifying. But don’t automatically assume that your children will not be interested. With the pressures on kids today, they may be as ready to simplify as you are.

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

  It’s one thing to get your children involved in your plans for simplifying or, if they’re not interested, to work around them. But it can be another issue entirely if your spouse is not open to the idea.

  If this is your predicament, don’t give up on the idea of simplifying. There are a number of things you can do.

  First, you can look at all the areas of your own life that you can simplify, such as your work life, your social life, your volunteer projects, your exercise routine, your wardrobe, your car, your desk, your side of the medicine cabinet, and so forth.

  It’s entirely possible that as you begin to simplify your life so you can do the things you really enjoy doing, your partner may be inspired and decide to join you. If nothing else, at least you’ll have created energy to put up with someone who wants a complicated life.

  Whatever you do, don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to change the other person. If he or she is not interested in simplifying, the chances are good that no amount of nagging is going to transform them, and it will only complicate your life.

  Another thing you can do is change your expectations about how simple their life has to be. It’s possible that two people with disparate lifestyles can each make a valuable contribution to the other’s life. If you love one another, and are close in many other areas, you may each have to allow the other to pursue his or her own level of complexity.

  I
f, as often happens, the main issue is the other person’s clutter, the situation can be tricky. Many people have a lot of stuff because they’ve never learned how to throw things out, but under the right circumstances, they would be open to learning.

  Also, some people thrive on clutter and complexity, or think they do. It’s possible they’ve never stopped to think about how clutter can get in the way of living their lives, or how it’s getting in the way of your life. Often, these situations offer the potential for change, or at the very least, compromise.

  But when you’re dealing with someone whose clutter is a substitute for the love they never got as a child—or is a refuge from earlier abuse or deprivation—then you both might need to find professional help to deal with this issue.

  If the situation is or becomes untenable for you, it may be necessary to consider a permanent change. Although this is obviously a drastic measure, I’ve heard from many people who’ve said that one of the most important steps they took was to move on from a spouse whose life was incompatible with their own desire to live simply.

  Of course the other thing that can happen when one person starts devoting more time to the relationship is that the other person’s priorities change. They, too, become more attentive, and so the whole relationship improves.

  The other option is to try to find a friend (#34) who supports you in your desire to create a simple life and accept that, possibly for the time being, your spouse won’t be joining you.

  34. Find a Buddy

  If you feel you need help creating a simpler life, and your partner is not enrolled for the moment in your simplicity program, then find a sympathetic friend, or two or three, and connect with them on a regular basis so you can share ideas and provide encouragement as needed.

  Having even one other person who understands and approves of your need to simplify will make your task a lot easier. Our desire to simplify our lives goes against the mainstream in this culture, so going it alone can be a real challenge.

  If you have just one person supporting you in this, plan to connect by phone at least once or twice a week. Limit your phone calls to ten to fifteen minutes, or less if possible. It’s so easy to launch into a lengthy discussion that can derail your intention to have time for yourself.

  If there are three or four of you committed to simplifying, it might make more sense to arrange for a weekly meeting where you can all get together and share in round-robin fashion.

  For five people, for example, you could plan to meet for an hour and a half, allowing fifteen minutes for each person to share their own experiences from the week, followed by a wrap-up for fifteen minutes or so.

  Agree on the meeting arrangement in advance so you can launch right in without wasted time or effort. Use the wrap-up to evaluate the effectiveness of your session and determine whether or not you need to make any changes in the process.

  Make this gathering a model of simplification. Eliminate the extraneous stuff, such as refreshments, that quickly become one more complication in your life. For now, the goal is to use the group meeting as an aid to get to the simple life as efficiently as possible.

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

  In making the decision to simplify your life, you run the risk of going against the generally accepted American standard of success. Friends and associates who are still looking to Madison Avenue or to corporate America or the media to define what success is for them may well find your desire for a simpler life tantamount to heresy. They’ll think you’ve gone soft. Or that maybe you just don’t have what it takes to succeed in the “real” world.

  Sometimes—though they wouldn’t admit it—they see your new lifestyle as a threat to their own.

  To many, the idea of paring down and living a simple life seems not only impractical, it’s unthinkable. The question often is, “Why would you want to have only a little when you can have a lot? Or even have it all?”

  The reactions you receive can range anywhere from friendly teasing, to well-intentioned advice about hanging in there, to outright ostracism.

  And you may go through your own period of confusion. If you’ve spent a good deal of your life in recent years allowing your professional persona to define who you are, not only to yourself, but to your family, your friends, your colleagues, and your community, you may sometimes find yourself in situations where it’s a real challenge to let go of that identity.

  As you move along in your plan to simplify, take whatever time you feel is necessary to explain to friends your plan to create a life outside the narrow confines of what passes for success in the world. But don’t be surprised if they don’t immediately join you in your quest.

  It takes courage to buck the tide, but once you start to experience the freedom that comes from actively creating your own interpretation of success, you’ll find it easy to move on from people who haven’t yet figured out that having it all or spending long hours at an unsatisfying job will never define who they truly are, no matter how high the pay.

  You’ll no doubt soon reach the point, where you can say, as Cynthia Ferguson did (#3), “I’ve stopped trying to explain to people. Now I just let them wonder why I seem so happy and secure in myself these days.”

  36. Find a Happy Medium That Works for You

  One of the things I did in the early stages of our simplification program was to get rid of our houseplants. Our cat, Speed—named after a strong female character from one of Gibbs’s novels—was a strong female cat who got into the habit of eating the leaves of the plants; then she’d throw up on the carpet. It got to be such a hassle that it came down to deciding whether to get rid of the plants or to get rid of the cat.

  Because Speed is such a wonderful cat in every other respect, we decided the houseplants would have to go.

  It was only after I’d passed my plants on to friends and neighbors that I saw how much effort they’d been. As one reader wrote, “I had never realized how time consuming my houseplants were. They’re like kids—you’ve got to feed them, water them, and pick up after them. Like you, I got rid of all my plants and simplified my life!”

  But after several years without plants, I reached a point where I missed having them. I also realized that one of the reasons they’d been such a complication earlier was that my plant population had gotten out of control—I’d had far too many of them.

  A while back a friend gave me a beautiful Phalenopsis orchid and I’ve found, to my delight, that this is one plant Speed won’t touch. Orchids are low-maintenance plants that require minimal care, never drop their leaves, and have an exquisite bloom that lasts for months. So now I have a couple of gorgeous orchids around the house that I enjoy immensely. Not only are they beautiful, but they’re so simple.

  So, in getting rid of all the plants, I’d gotten carried away. Even though it simplified my life in the beginning stages to be free of them, I eventually found that having one or two beautiful plants added a lot to my life. I’d come back to a happy medium for me.

  Just be aware that you may have to take some drastic steps in the early stages of simplifying your life that will make things easier for you during the process of getting to simple—such as cutting out the newspapers, eliminating some of the routine household chores, or temporarily dropping a lot of your social activities.

  Then, as you achieve a certain level of comfort and ease by simplifying other areas of your life, you may decide to go back to some of your previous practices. Or you may find that by doing them differently from the way you did when your life was hectic, they can contribute something to your life in their new incarnation.

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

  As Gibbs and I went through the process of simplifying, we got into the habit of asking ourselves, “Is this going to simplify our lives?” every time we considered a potential purchase, or a new service, or a change to our routine.

  For example, one of the things we thought we wanted to do, as we were offload
ing many of the possessions we’d accumulated during our hard-charging years, was cut back to one car. Since I work at home and Gibbs now had an easy ten-minute commute to his office, we thought that with a bit of judicious planning, we could easily get by with only one set of wheels.

  So when we moved to the condo and found ourselves on a bus line that provided direct access to Gibbs’s place of work, we thought, Aha! Now is the time to get rid of the old Plymouth. But before we did, we decided to try the bus schedule. It worked well for some months, until Gibbs’s office setup changed and the bus schedule was no longer convenient. And at the same time, my schedule required that I spend more time on the road and so I needed the car more than I had.

  We were still philosophically disposed to getting rid of one of the cars, but the reality was that, given our new schedule and the limited public transportation in a part of the country that relies heavily on the automobile, it wouldn’t actually simplify our lives to do so.

  At another point we were doing some minor renovations to our home and had drawn up a list of the changes we wanted to make. By this time we’d gotten into the habit of asking ourselves, “Is this going to simplify our lives?” So we went down the list and were able to eliminate over half the things we’d originally thought we’d need to have done.

  Yes, it would simplify our lives to replace the aging, small-capacity washer that tended to mangle the clothes and the decrepit dryer that had only one setting (fry). And, yes, adding a kitty door to the cat box would simplify not only the cleanup and maintenance, but would provide more space in the already limited closet where the cat box was housed.

  But the kitchen countertops were fine, and replacing them would add nothing to their serviceability, but a good deal to the expense and a lot of disruption to our lives in the interim. It was simpler to leave them as they were.