Living the Simple Life

by Elaine St James

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

  I got this idea from readers. It’s such a basic concept. It’s so simple. And it works. You can teach it to your kids. You can easily put it into practice in your own life.

  Well, it’s not always so easy; but it’ll definitely help you keep the clutter to manageable limits.

  It applies to clothes, books, toys, shoes, tools, dishes, glassware, kitchen gadgets, computers and other electronic equipment, telephones, eyeglasses, linens, towels, pillows, umbrellas, and among other things, furniture.

  Furniture? Yes. And this is the one area where most people already put this idea into practice. Given the limitations of the average home, if you purchase a new couch, more often than not you’ll pass the old one on to someone else who might be able to use it. Otherwise, the living room would quickly be quite obviously overcrowded.

  But in other areas of our homes, the overcrowding is not so immediately apparent. Most bookcases can hold another book. Most closets can hold another outfit. Most kitchen pantries can hold another toaster oven. Most toy boxes can hold another Barbie doll. And so forth. Up to a point.

  When we go beyond that point, our stuff starts to get out of hand. If we’d started way-back-when throwing out the old when we brought in the new, we wouldn’t have tool chests so jammed we can never find a screwdriver, or lingerie drawers so crammed we can never find a decent pair of knee socks, or linen closets so full of everything else that we can’t open the door without having half the contents come tumbling down around our ankles.

  Gibbs and I have learned to use this method to keep our books within bounds. Now, when we acquire a new book, we go through the shelves and pick an old book to pass on to someone else. We also use this system with our clothes.

  It’s often difficult to predict ahead of time the point at which there’s too much stuff for any given space. But if you get in the habit of throwing out the old when you bring in the new, you won’t have to predict. You can simply enjoy the freedom of uncluttered spaces.

  54. The Simple Souvenir

  As a travel writer, Gibbs spends a good deal of time visiting interesting places around the globe.

  It started to become obvious that we’d soon overload our family and friends and run out of space in our home if we continued to bring back shrunken heads from every place we visited. Aside from the expense, there was always the hassle of fitting one more thing into the luggage, maneuvering through customs, and arriving back home with the item still intact.

  Early on we began keeping souvenir matchbook covers from the restaurants we visited on our travels. We now have one huge bowl that sits on our kitchen countertop that holds hundreds of matchbooks. Hardly a week goes by that one of us doesn’t reach in, pull out a matchbook, read the inscription, and pull up a wonderful memory from our travels.

  The Plow and Angel, the San Ysidro Ranch where we fell in love. The Three Georges, Georgetown, where we spent our honeymoon. The Pacific International Hotel, Cairns, Australia. Jumby Bay, Antigua. The Wakaya Club, Fiji Islands. Johnny Sesaws, Peru, Vermont. The Atlantic Inn, Block Island.

  The matchbooks are colorful. They’re lightweight. They’re nonbreakable. They require no special packaging and they fit easily into a jacket pocket for the trip home. They’re available everywhere. They’re low maintenance. They don’t need to be insured. They’re functional. They’re free. Eighteen years of memories that fit into a decorative bowl. The ideal souvenir for the simple life.

  Other simple souvenirs that won’t run you out of house and home and pocketbook include airline luggage tags, postcards, small flag insignia, or postage stamps from foreign countries.

  55. What to Tell the Grandkids

  Recently a woman pulled me aside after one of my speaking engagements and told me all the steps she and her husband had taken to simplify their lives. This included accepting an early retirement package offered by her husband’s employer, selling their house, paring down their possessions to what would fit into their motor home, and setting out for two to three years to travel around the country to see the sights and to visit their four children and nine grandchildren who were scattered around the country.

  Her problem was, what to tell the grandchildren when they asked what she and Grandpa wanted for Christmas, or birthdays, or as going away mementos.

  Being supportive grandparents, they didn’t want to discourage their grandchildren’s creative endeavors. But they were so delighted to have reached a point where they were free of time- and energy-consuming possessions. They had exactly what they wanted, and they didn’t have room in their scaled-back lifestyle to accommodate a lot of chotchkes, no matter how imaginative the object or well intentioned the thought behind it.

  The answer seemed obvious to me: Ask for a box of homemade fudge, or a basket of Christmas cookies, or any other consumable items within the range of the kids’ talents and their parents’ patience.

  A gift of this type encourages thoughtful and resource-conscious gift giving on the part of the children, while providing the grandparents with a sweet reminder of the gift bearer.

  The gift would be short lived—only as long as it takes to consume a box of brownies—but the memory of it could last forever. (“Remember how delicious Sara’s gingerbread men tasted that evening as we watched the sun set over the Grand Canyon?”)

  It wouldn’t put a strain on their space limitations, nor would it ultimately be one more thing to discard into our overloaded ecosystem.

  Also, it would be an excellent opportunity to propose to their children and grandchildren that the time has come in all our lives to think about scaling back on our purchasing and consuming habits.

  Gift giving doesn’t have to mean going to a store to purchase some item that the other person may or may not want, and may or may not have space for. A lovingly crafted card or the joy of quiet time spent together can add far more meaning to our lives than a bagatelle plucked off the consumer merry-go-round. What better way to teach succeeding generations how little we need to be happy.

  And what better legacy to leave our kids than a new consumer ethic.

  56. Put a Moratorium on Shopping

  In Chapter Two, I mention that one way to save time is to limit your purchases over the next thirty days to groceries and basic essentials.

  This practice has several obvious benefits. Not only will it save you time and money and minimize the clutter, but it will go a long way toward changing your consuming habits.

  When Gibbs and I looked at the process we’d gone through to eliminate the stuff we no longer wanted in our lives, we saw that we’d made some fairly wise choices. We had minimized our stuff, and there wasn’t much more we needed or wanted to acquire.

  Even so, we found ourselves falling into some of our old buying patterns. Since we’d had such great success with our thirty-day list (#49), we decided to take that idea a step further. As an experiment, we put a moratorium on shopping. We decided we wouldn’t purchase anything except groceries and personal necessities for three months.

  If we began to feel there was something we might want to acquire, we’d either put it on a list for later or we’d come up with a creative solution rather than a buying solution (#51).

  Going for three months without shopping for anything but our food and personal items turned out to be so liberating we extended the moratorium for another three months.

  This was not about living in austerity or depriving ourselves of the things we need. We approached it as a challenge and an opportunity to break the buying habits that had been a force in our lives. Not only did we save time and money and reduce the clutter that comes into our home, but we drastically changed our consumer mentality. We simply don’t acquire stuff like we used to.

  When you look at the buying habits that have taken hold in our culture over the past thirty years or so, you can see that we made the decision somewhere along the line to work longer hours so we could acquire more things. We’ve exch
anged our leisure time for stuff.

  A lot of us are starting to question that exchange. It hasn’t been a good trade-off. Not for us, not for our children, not for the environment.

  I urge you to try this moratorium. Even if you do it for only thirty days it’ll be an eye-opener. You’ll see how little we really need, and how easy it is to get along without most of the things we feel we have to have.

  Learning to step off the consumer treadmill has been one of the major benefits Gibbs and I have gotten from simplifying our lives.

  SEVEN

  Learning to Say No

  57. The Truly Free Person

  The playwright Jules Renard once said the truly free person is one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.

  It’s difficult to imagine anyone actually doing that, and it’s impossible for most of us to imagine doing it ourselves. In our culture it’s more socially acceptable to be nice than it is to be honest or direct.

  The social pressure to automatically say yes to invitations is a challenging one to overcome. There are so many considerations, and they’re all mixed in together. At one level we’re afraid the other person will feel rejected. At another level we’re afraid that if we start saying no, people will reject us. And even though we may not want to go, there’s frequently a part of us that wants to be included.

  More often than not, our true desire to not accept an invitation has less to do with the invitation we’d like to decline, and more to do with our need or desire to do something else—such as spend time with our kids or a quiet evening with our partner.

  But for many, it seems easier to spend an evening having dinner with people we’d rather not have dinner with than it is to put up with the guilt or the discomfort we’d feel if we turned down the invitation in the first place.

  Then there are all the shoulds. It’s obvious there are some things we feel we should do—like taking care of an ailing parent or helping a friend in need, among others—that we really should do. But there are often many things we feel we should do that, in fact, we don’t really have to do. Getting to the point where we can tell the difference is a major milestone in the simplification process.

  For some fortunate people this is not a problem. But for many the inability to graciously decline an invitation, or to stop doing all the things they feel they should do, is a major complication. It robs us of many hours we could spend doing something we’d rather do.

  As you begin to simplify your life, you’re going to be making a lot of changes in the way you spend your time. If saying no is a problem for you, go back to your short list (#21) and keep it firmly in mind. Your objective will be to get to the point where you see that by turning down an invitation you’re not saying no to someone else; rather you’re saying yes! to what you really want to do.

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

  One woman who attended a talk I gave suggested the following solution to the problem of social invitations and the guilt that often accompanies our desire to say no.

  She’d been in the travel business for many years and had finally reached a point where she was fed up with constantly being on the go and feeling she had to say yes to every invitation that came across her desk.

  When she first started out, she loved the social whirl. It gave her a chance to meet new people and to expand not only her social base but her client base as well. Over the years, both hosting and attending dinner meetings and cocktail parties became an integral part of her life.

  But in recent years it had gotten to be too much. She realized she no longer knew where her business life ended and her personal life began.

  She decided she needed a breather. So she stopped issuing and accepting social invitations entirely for six months. She said that what made it so easy—and eliminated the guilt—was that she said no to everyone, no exceptions.

  Obviously, this freed up a lot of her time, which she used to evaluate where she was in her life. By stopping everything she had a chance to see that she was ready to make some changes in her career. She’d been moving so fast, she was unaware that she was close to burnout.

  At the end of six months, she sold her business and moved across the country to start working for a small travel magazine where she could use and develop her writing talents.

  Your desire to reduce the number of social activities in your life may have nothing to do with a career move, but you can still use her tactic. Simply decline any and all invitations for a month or two or more. The time you free up could provide a lot of clarity and direction for your life.

  If you keep this plan in place long enough, the invitations may stop coming in altogether. This will give you a chance to clean the slate, and perhaps to start all over again. You might choose to do it differently next time.

  59. Move Beyond the Guilt

  Like many people, I used to have a problem with the guilt of saying no. And sometimes I still do.

  But my friend, Sue, is much more realistic about dealing with invitations. Her philosophy has helped me eliminate a lot of the guilt that comes from saying no.

  She points out that the one who’s doing the asking might like you to join them, but if you don’t accept the invitation, it won’t be the end of the world for them. Someone else will accept, or they’ll make other plans, so it’s no big deal.

  Now, they may say it’s a big deal. After all, that’s the socially acceptable thing to do—what else can one who’s extending an invitation do if someone declines, say they’re glad you’re not coming? It’s just not done.

  So they make regretful noises (“So sorry you can’t join us… maybe next time… we’ll miss you” and the like). And usually they’re sincere, but they’re probably not devastated. Those kinds of comments were designed to get everyone off the hook gracefully, not to induce guilt in the one who is declining.

  And so the one who gets declined moves on, and they don’t think a whole lot about it. In truth, they’re too busy getting on with their life or tracking down the next person on their list to hold your no against you. But certainly any momentary flash of regret a host might feel because someone declines is seldom worth the paroxysms of guilt felt by the one who’s declining.

  After all, when someone turns you down, you don’t rush to the nearest cliff to leap off. No. You move on. Though you probably say things like you’re so sorry they can’t join you, you’ll miss them, maybe next time, and you usually mean it. But you probably don’t think enough about it to justify the guilt they might feel by saying no to you.

  Also, keep in mind that you’re not doing anyone a favor by showing up for a dinner party or any other type of gathering when your heart isn’t in it. You’d be doing the host and everyone else a much greater service by staying home and freeing up the space for someone who’d love to be there.

  60. Afraid You’ll Miss Something?

  I was talking to my cousin, Joanie, a while back about the issue of saying no. She and her husband, Joe, had just gone through a brief soul-searching exercise because they’d recently decided they’d been going out too much, and yet they kept finding themselves saying yes to invitations that they really didn’t want to accept. When they thought more about it, they realized they were saying yes because they were afraid if they didn’t go, they’d miss something.

  So they’d go, and invariably they’d find that what they missed out on was a quiet, restful evening at home.

  I knew exactly what she meant, because I’ve often felt that way, too. She said she’d always thought it was a family thing—because everyone in our family feels this way.

  But I know from the letters I get and the people I talk to around the country, there are many others who have this problem, too. It’s a cultural thing. There are so many opportunities out there, and we don’t want to miss any of them. So we frequently find ourselves in the classic dilemma of wanting to go and not wanting to go at the same time.

  I’ve finally reached a point where I know
I have to be ready to miss some new things, if only so that I’ll then have time to enjoy the old things.

  61. The Reality of the Urgent Request

  Gibbs, who has been an active volunteer for numerous organizations over the years, recently received a card from a group he used to do volunteer work for. On it was a very gracious handwritten note from the director of the group, telling him how much they had missed him and asking him to come back to join them as soon as he could.

  Since he’s actively involved with a different volunteer organization right now, he knew he couldn’t commit to another assignment, but the friendly note gave him a moment’s pause, and just a twang of guilt. Maybe he should go back and help.

  But after he’d thought about it for a bit, he realized the card asking him to come back was merely a routine. His name just happened to come to the top of the list. This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t love to have him come back, but this was a call to reactivate volunteers, not a device to make anyone feel guilty if they couldn’t participate.

  The need to fill a spot also applies to many social and work-related requests as well. Keep this in mind the next time someone says you simply must join them (for something you’re not interested in), that it just won’t be the same without you. It won’t, but they’ll survive. And so will you.

  Another area that is frequently a problem for people are the social functions, or any kind of an event, that people feel they should attend because someone has gone to so much trouble to put them on.

  My feeling is that if someone has gone to a lot of trouble to put them on, they presumably did it because they enjoy doing that type of thing. There’ll be enough people who show up because they want to be there, so you don’t need to feel you have to.