This sounds like a situation that’s gotten out of control. But it’s not all that unusual. Not only does this excess of gift giving complicate the parents’ lives because of all the toys, games, and other paraphernalia that are taking up space in their home, but it complicates the children’s lives as well. It becomes overwhelming. They don’t know what to play with first. It numbs their sensitivity and their creativity.
If you’re watching, you’ll see that invariably they pick one or two toys that become their favorites, and the rest sit idly, taking up room and cluttering up their space.
It also sets up unrealistic expectations that can never be fulfilled in the real world. And it certainly gives them a negative message in terms of consumerism and the habits of responding to television advertising (100 percent of the ten best-selling toys are tied to television shows).
You might want to start setting some parameters for your parents—the kids’ grandparents—as well as aunts and uncles and friends and relatives. “Look, Mom, we appreciate all the things you do for the boys, but we feel we need to set some limits on the number of toys that come into the house and complicate our lives. We’d like to limit the number of presents to one or two, and any other money you want to spend will go into a college fund.”
It’s that simple.
92. Cultivate Simple Values
Relaxing on some of the household chores; reducing your social commitments; cutting back to eight-hour workdays if you are employed outside the home; reducing your commute time; spending less time shopping and consuming; changing your expectations about the size of your house, the green of your lawn, and the whiteness of your laundry will make it possible for you to create the time to teach your kids simple, mind-expanding, soul-filling activities.
In addition to teaching them to cook and sew and do their own laundry as Jennifer Sellers has done (#86), try taking them on nature walks and bike rides, and teaching them to use the public library and spend quiet time there. Plant a garden, build castles in the sand or castles in the air, watch sunsets and sunrises. Teach them to seek out quiet time each day and to enjoy developing their own inner resources as appropriate to their age, through reading, writing, journal writing, and their own creativity through music, drawing, painting, and any other artistic leanings they might have.
As reader Ann Hopson wrote, “As the parent of two young children, I feel lucky to have found this avenue to explore. My girls, 5 and 7, love nature, new experiences, and freedom, so your suggestions are a happy alternative to Chuck E Cheese, amusement parks, and costly mall shopping. We love visiting free places like botanical gardens, local historical sites and museums, and even doing genealogical studies in libraries, which have become our family’s favorite resource. Luckily, my girls are happily entertained at home with our own simplistic activities.”
Yes, these activities will take more of your time, certainly in the beginning, than sitting them in front of the television. But in the long run, having happy children who love simple pleasures and who can be their own source for entertainment will make life simpler for you and for them.
TWELVE
Simple Wardrobe Ideas for Women
93. Make Your Own Rules
I gave a talk on simplifying recently and when it came to the subject of simple clothing, the women in the group were commiserating on how difficult it is to deal with the vagaries of women’s fashion. Many of us are fed up with the herculean task of putting together a suitable look that is functional and versatile and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
One of the men in the audience announced that he was an investment banker who puts together venture capital for the fashion industry. He said the women’s clothing designers and manufacturers were going through some very tough times and a lot of restructuring because sales have been down considerably in recent years, far more than the overall downturn in the economy would explain.
He was hearing over and over again that women were tired of struggling with the frustration of trying to find clothes that worked for them. He said the feeling in many parts of the industry was that women had simply stopped buying clothes the way they used to. As he saw it, the entire fashion industry was going to have to make some drastic changes in the way they designed and produced clothes for our rapidly changing lifestyles.
I hope he’s right. But it would be surprising to see any monumental changes in the promulgation of fashion trends in our lifetime. Clothing designers and manufacturers have spent too many billions of dollars creating the epidemic feelings of discontent in American women. It would be a major turnaround for them to suddenly start producing clothing that actually works for the majority of women.
If you’ve reached a point in your pursuit of the simple life where you can move to that cabin in the woods or in some other way arrange your life so you can ignore even the minimum decrees of the fashion industry, you can probably limit yourself to a couple of sets of jeans and a pair of boots—which is my ultimate ideal—and get away with it.
But those of us who plan to remain in the swing of commerce—either by choice or by circumstance—will probably continue to play the fashion game to one degree or another. The objective, as far as I’m concerned, is to set as many of my own rules as I can, and to play the rest of them as simply as possible.
There are many women out there who feel as I do about this issue. We’re not interested in being fashion plates, but we want or need to look presentable, and we’d like to do so with the least amount of fuss, bother, and expense.
Needless to say, it’d be a lot easier if we could just say to hell with Madison Avenue and ignore the incredibly powerful dictates of the fashion industry. If you’ve been able to do that, congratulations. You’re ahead of the game.
I haven’t yet reached the point where I can disregard all those edicts, but, with some effort, I have gotten to a point where I can turn my back on a lot of them.
After some months of pondering this issue I finally put together a simple look that works for me. And I learned a few things in the process.
I discovered that when it comes to clothes—as with many other things—less is definitely more. It’s so much simpler to work with a few classic pieces that are always in style and work with each other than to have a closet jammed with the latest fashions that, if they ever look good, don’t look good for long and seldom work together.
I figured out that I don’t need a multitude of colors in my closet. I’ve greatly reduced the complexity of putting together a suitable look by limiting my palette to two or three basic colors that are always in style.
I see no reason to have more than a few pairs of shoes in my closet at any one time. And they all have the same heel height.
I’ve eliminated the accessories that have cluttered up my drawers for years, most of them seldom used.
I’ve found the simplicity of a couple of pairs of earrings liberating beyond belief.
I’ve learned to make certain that every piece of clothing I buy has pockets so I don’t have to carry a purse.
I built a simple wardrobe around a couple of outfits that I already had in my closet and I liked. I wanted one basic look that I could use as a uniform, which I could layer to take me through the seasons.
One of my challenges was to find out why these particular outfits worked for me, so I could easily add to them through the years as one piece wore out, and so I could repeat the process when I needed to (which I hope won’t have to be any time soon).
I know many women would not be happy with the limited range of colors and styles this approach embraces. But if you’re looking to create your own simple look, I hope there will be some principles here that you can adapt to your own set of rules, based on your own needs and circumstances, rather than on the whims of fashion.
94. Start with What You Already Have
One of the rules we used to get rid of the clutter in our home was “If you haven’t used it in a year, throw it out.” The first place we started with was our closet
s.
I was strongly tempted, when I looked into my closet and saw all the things I hadn’t worn in over a year—some for many years-–to throw out everything but the clothes on my back and start over from scratch.
Though I got rid of a lot of stuff on that first attempt, I didn’t quite have the nerve to get rid of everything. Later, I was awfully glad I hadn’t.
It turned out that, mixed in with all the clothes I hadn’t worn recently—and with a lot of things I had worn but wasn’t crazy about—there were several treasures. These were outfits—a couple of jackets, a long skirt, a pair of slacks, some simple tops—that I’d had for a number of years that I quite liked and I had continued to wear over and over again.
I wore them so much because I always felt good in them. They were comfortable. The colors, the style, the fabric, and the look all suited me. So I kept them and got rid of most, though at this point, not all, of the other clothes—the sweaters, suits, blouses, shirts, jackets, shoes, boots, and several drawers of accessories that I knew I’d never wear again.
Those few pieces I liked became the starting point for my new simplified wardrobe and stayed in the front part of my closet. There were other items that I wasn’t sure about, which I hung in the back of the closet as a safety net, just in case my ideas for my simple look didn’t pan out. Eventually, as my new wardrobe took shape, I felt more comfortable about letting go of the fall-back pieces altogether.
If it feels as though your closet is out of control and you’ve been thinking you’d like to take some steps to simplify it, start slowly, and don’t jettison everything just yet. The chances are good that you, too, have some old favorites that you wear over and over again. If so, keep them.
If you know why you like them and why they work for you, the job of building from them (or replacing them with similiar pieces if need be) will be much easier. But if, as I didn’t, you don’t have a clue why they work, don’t worry about that part just yet. There is help available. But you might find it useful to sort through a couple of other questions first.
95. Limit Your Color Scheme
A few years back I had my colors done by one of the color consultants that were in vogue at the time. I came away from that session with a two-foot-square display board that I could hang in my closet, to which was attached at least four dozen color swatches, representing all the different shades of colors that would be suitable for my skin tones.
I was also given a credit card–size, accordian-type, color-swatch holder containing these same colors, which I could conveniently keep in my purse so I could stay within my range of colors when I went clothes shopping. You probably know the type of color charts I mean.
When I started weeding clothes out of my closet in my first attempt to simplify my wardrobe, it dawned on me that just because this consultant said I could wear all these different colors, it didn’t mean I had to. I didn’t have all those colors in my closet of course, but it felt like I did.
In theory, each color in one’s palette could be worn with every other color in one’s palette. But in my experience, it never quite worked out that way. I’ve always suspected that all the clothing manufacturers got together and conspired to make sure that none of their colors worked with the palettes the color consultants were working with.
But if they don’t do that, there’s no doubt that many of them go to great lengths to figure out how to formulate this year’s “in” colors so that, not only do they not work with last year’s “in” colors, but they don’t work with any previous year’s “in” colors either. Though those color palettes are now somewhat passé, many women still buy clothes with their color charts in mind.
The result is that millions of us have ended up season after season with numerous outfits in our closets, no one piece of which ever blends with any other piece. It’s just one of the many ways clothing manufacturers lure us into starting all over again each year in our seldom attainable attempt to create an acceptable fashion statement.
I began to see that having such a wide range of colors was a major complication for my wardrobe. So I narrowed my palette down to three colors.
The colors I chose, black, white, and shades of gray—with complements of taupe—would not be everyone’s choices and, in fact, I’m not certain they’re my first choices. I decided on these colors because my favorite outfits—the ones I wore over and over again, and that I always felt good in, and were therefore the ones I wanted to build my simple wardrobe from—were in these colors.
Also, I stayed with these mostly darker colors because, as several readers with the same idea pointed out, darker colors are easier to work with from season to season and lend an aura of quality and professionalism to your total look.
(Since my simple puppies are black and white and gray, I figured I could simplify the dog hair issue at the same time: The black hairs would end up on the black clothes, the white hairs would end up on the white clothes, the gray hairs would end up on the gray clothes, and, as we all know, taupe goes with everything. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but if I alter my expectations slightly, I can overlook the dog hair.)
I don’t feel I have to stick with these colors for the rest of my life, but they work for me now and into the forseeable future. And with basic colors like these, I can always add a splash of color in a vest or a top to put a bit of zip into my palette from one year to the next should I feel so inclined.
Limiting your palette also simplifies your accessories—your jewelry, scarves, belts, purses, and shoes.
Take a moment right now to imagine how much simpler shopping for clothes would be if you limited yourself to three or four of the colors that look best on you. Just think of the tremendous number of clothes you could pass right by because they don’t fit into your color scheme.
96. Figure Out Your Clothing Needs
For years I had hoped to find one classic all-purpose outfit that would be suitable for my work life, my social life, my exercise regimen, and every other possible event.
I would then acquire seven copies of that magic outfit—one for each day of the week as Einstein reportedly did—and that would be it. I’d never again, well, almost never again, have to bother with the task of building a suitable wardrobe or with spending time each day figuring out what to wear.
It’s possible my life will one day be so simple that one outfit will work for everything I do. But I’ve finally figured out that for now I need clothes for at least three separate circumstances: casual clothes for my morning walks and for my day-to-day work at the computer in my home office; business attire; and something in between—not dressy but not sweats—for wearing into town for a luncheon meeting or for a casual dinner out.
Since we simplified our lives, formal attire has become a non-issue. On the rare occasion I attend a formal gathering, one of my business suits has to do. Otherwise, as Thoreau did, I tend to avoid events that require fancy garb.
If you don’t already know what they are, it might be helpful to take some time to figure out the kinds of clothes you actually need for the types of activities you engage in.
This seems so obvious, but I see this mismatching of form to function over and over again. I know many women, for example, who love business suits and who therefore have a closet full of them, but whose work life actually calls for more casual attire. They have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.
97. Find Your Best Silhouette
The factor that moves the subject of fashion up a couple of notches on the complexity scale is the tremendous variety of styles that are available for women. Men’s fashion options are fairly limited and predictable. But the possibilities for women know no bounds. Consequently, it’s a tremendous challenge for most of us to find an acceptable style, or silhouette, that works for our particular body type.
Pulling together a suitable silhouette seems like it should be easy. But how many times have you gone clothes shopping and fallen in love with an outfit because it looked terrific on a mannequin
, or even on the hanger, only to get home and find it doesn’t look all that great on you.
You love the fabric, you love the color, you love the idea of it, it’s exactly the type of thing you think you need. But even though you tried it on in the dressing room, the fact is it simply doesn’t work.
More likely than not you keep it because it’s just too much trouble to take it back and start all over again. Then it’s guaranteed to be one of those outfits that ends up in the back of your closet that you never wear or is not comfortable when you do wear it.
Often the reason it doesn’t work is that, even though it may fit size-wise, it doesn’t fit silhouette-wise. It’s either too long in the waist, or too short in the length, or too narrow in the shoulders, or too broad in the hips, or too frilly, or too severe, or something else is wrong with it.
Whether you’re short or tall, large or small, young or old, broad or narrow, there is at least one silhouette that can make you look and feel like a million bucks. Finding it may not be simple—though it can be done—but having it will be.
Zeroing in on one or two silhouettes that work for you will simplify your present and future wardrobe immeasurably. Once you find a look you’re comfortable with, you can build on it forever. You can add a piece one year and drop a piece the next year, or fill in pieces as you need them. You can dress it up or down. Using layers, you can take it from season to season.
Finding one of your ideal silhouettes will eliminate the continual frustration of never being satisfied with how you look. It will make it possible for you to get up in the morning, get dressed, and not have to think about clothes for the rest of the day. It’ll save you time. It’ll save you money. It’ll be one less thing to complicate your life.
You may already know what silhouettes suit you best. But if the prospect of figuring it out has always been one of life’s great mysteries, you can simplify the process by getting some help.
Living the Simple Life Page 14