Living the Simple Life

by Elaine St James

Stop listening to the radio, the CD player, and your Walkman—at home, in the car, at the office, when you exercise.

  Stop reading magazines. Recycle or pass on to a friend the stack of magazines sitting on your reading table waiting for you to find the time to read them.

  Do the same with any magazines that arrive in the mail during the next month. Don’t set them aside and think you’ll read them when the month is up. If you do that, you’ll be just as behind then as you are now. You have to start someplace.

  4. Stop all escape-type reading—detective stories, murder mysteries, fantasies.

  5. Simplify your family meals as much as possible. Plan to prepare batches of soups or casseroles ahead of time and freeze them in serving portions. Or buy a month’s supply of frozen dinners. (It’s only for a month.) Make sure there is plenty of fresh fruit available. Dr. Spock always said if kids have fruit, they don’t have to eat their vegetables. Use paper plates to minimize cleanup.

  Enlist the help of your mate and children in the preparation, provisioning, and cleanup of meals, including breakfasts and lunches. Make a game out of this for your kids. Make a challenge out of this for your spouse.

  6. Do only the minimal housekeeping chores. Keep the house picked up and orderly, but don’t worry about dusting, vacuuming, window washing, mowing the lawn, waxing the car, or polishing the candelabrum.

  You may have to change your expectations about how clean your house has to be to do this. Or you may have to change the expectations your mate or your mother or Madison Avenue has laid on you (#9).

  7. Do minimal laundry. Our mothers did the week’s laundry for the entire family in one day or less, without the high-tech machinery we have today. I know women who now wash a load or two every night of the week.

  If we learn to be careful about how we wear our clothes—and train our kids to be careful, too—we can greatly reduce the laundering chore, at least for a month.

  We can let the sheets and towels go for a week or more.

  Make a quick calculation right now as to how much time you’d save you if you allowed yourself to do the laundry differently. How many evenings would it free up? How much of the weekend?

  8. With the exception of groceries, eliminate all shopping. Stock up on things you might need ahead of time. Or simply do without. No one has ever died from running out of eye shadow. Or shaving cream.

  Think of this as a personal challenge, and be prepared to use some of your self-discipline. The urge to rush out and buy something we think we need has become overwhelming in this culture. Multibillion-dollar media campaigns ensure that this urge continues. You’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll save when you learn to break this habit.

  9. Don’t accept or arrange any social or family engagements.

  10. Cancel all civic or volunteer obligations. Simply say, “Sorry, but I’m starting a new project and won’t have time for anything for thirty days.”

  Take five minutes right now to see if there are any other things particular to your schedule and lifestyle that you could change or eliminate to free up some time over the next thirty days.

  Obviously you can extend any of these ideas into a 60- or a 90- or a 365-day plan. The idea is to free up as much of your time as possible so you can start thinking about some long-term changes you can make in 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

  Take vacation days on Mondays or Fridays to give yourself a couple of three-day weekends. Or take some stand-alone vacation days in the middle of the week.

  Take a week or more of vacation time, and use it to get started simplifying your life.

  Take a couple of sick days or personal days.

  Make an arrangement with your boss to work four ten-hour days for the next month (or permanently), and use the fifth day each week to start simplifying.

  Plan to spend a Saturday or a Sunday or an entire weekend at home with no social or family commitments (except for your immediate family). Remember to eliminate the standard distractions, such as the radio and television, during this time.

  16. Escape to a Quiet Spot

  No doubt some people can arrange quiet time at home and actually make progress there in these first few steps.

  But if your life is anything like mine was, you’ve got so much going on at home that you wouldn’t be able to have an extended period of time without interruptions. Therefore, it might be easier if you can get away from your home or work environment.

  This includes being away from phones, faxes, radios, television, the fridge, laundry, friends, neighbors, bosses, co-workers, and all other potential preoccupations.

  One of your best options for an extended period of undisturbed time would be a nearby monastery or retreat house where you’ll have a simple but comfortable room without a phone—where meals are included, and the entire atmosphere is arranged for a contemplative withdrawal from the world. (Check out Sanctuaries, by Jack and Marcia Kelley.)

  As an alternative, consider renting a convenient motel room for a couple of days, and give out the phone number only for use in emergencies.

  Spend some time right now thinking about the ideal place that would suit your circumstances.

  Maybe you have friends who will be away on vacation and would be open to having you use their space for a couple of days.

  Or perhaps you know someone who has a summer home or a cabin in the woods that you could rent or borrow for the time you need.

  Or if you’re comfortable with roughing it, get out your camping gear and head for the hills.

  If you can’t get away from home for a couple of days right now, but can see your way clear to freeing up an hour or so every morning, consider finding a quiet table at your local library, or an empty pew in a church, as a place in which to get started thinking about your life.

  Another alternative is the great outdoors, perhaps on a park bench.

  If you simply can’t get away from your home, then do what you can to create the time and space there for quiet contemplation without the usual interruptions. Unplug the phone, turn off the radio and the TV, cancel your coffee break with your next-door neighbor.

  If you’re a mother with young children, hire a babysitter for a couple of afternoons. Or find a friend who wants to simplify, too—or who at least is sympathetic to your desire to simplify—and trade babysitting for a couple of afternoons or evenings.

  Do whatever you need to do to find a space that will work for you. And do what you can to make it special. It’s possible that this time will be for you, as it was for me, a major turning point in the way you live your life. It will be fun for you to be able to look back on this time and space fondly, and with sweet memories.

  17. What to Take with You

  This might seem like a minor point, but for those of us who are addicted to our stuff, it will serve as a helpful reminder.

  To some people it’s probably obvious that if you’re going to hole up for a couple of days away from home with the purpose of thinking about simplifying your life, you’ll want to take only a minimum amount of paraphernalia. However, it wasn’t apparent to me when I left for my retreat, so I’ll mention it here.

  When I headed off to the hermitage for a mere four days, I had two satchels packed with personal belongings. One was full of clothes, shoes, and other personal items I didn’t need and, in fact, most of which I never used. The other was loaded with books, magazines, notebooks, paper, pens, tapes and a tape player, and other miscellaneous stuff—most of which I also never used but had included on the “you never know when you might need it” theory.

  I lugged all this baggage up a couple of flights of stairs and into my simple room, which was suddenly no longer quite so simple. After sorting through it all, I realized there was more than I’d actually use. Since it was getting in my way, I packed some of it up and took it back down to the car.

  When I set out on similar missio
ns these days—which I do on a regular basis—I leave the books and the tapes behind. I take a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a pen, and a notebook. When I thought about it later, I realized that’s all I actually used, though I spent a fair amount of time and energy being preoccupied with all the other things.

  This is a microcosm of the macrocosm for a lot of us in this culture: We’re continually overwhelmed with and distracted by our stuff.

  You might want to keep this in mind if you’re packing for a brief retreat from the world.

  18. Ask Yourself Some Simple Questions

  Once you’ve created the time and have found a quiet place in which to think, a powerful next step is to ask yourself some simple questions.

  One of the most obvious things to ask is “What is complicating my life right now?” Is it career pressures? Your relationship with your boss? With your co-workers? Are you spending too much time working? Too much time commuting? How could you cut back in these areas?

  Sometimes simply taking the time to pinpoint the hot spots can go a long way toward alleviating the pressure.

  The next obvious question to ask yourself would be “What do I need to do to simplify these areas?”

  No one knows the minute details of your day or the secret wishes of your psyche better than you do. No one knows the answers to these questions better than you do, either.

  Of course, your life may have become so complicated that even you are momentarily out of touch with the innermost workings of your being.

  So getting to the point where you can ask the questions could be the easy part. Waiting for the answers can be the hard part. You may have to be patient. You’ll definitely have to cut back on the distractions to listen carefully.

  One of your toughest tasks may be forcing yourself to pay attention to the answer. You may be hearing things you don’t want to hear. Your inner voice may be telling you that what you need to do is to quit your job or to find a new career or to move on from a relationship that isn’t working. Remember, one of the reasons we keep our lives complicated is so we won’t have to listen to our inner voice telling us what we need to do to make our lives work better.

  But asking these questions can start the ball rolling. Keep a journal or notebook handy and write down any thoughts, insights, or solutions that come to you.

  Even now, several years later, I’ve found it helpful to keep these questions in mind if I notice my life starting to get complicated again.

  19. Set Your Own Pace

  I’ve heard from many people who quit their jobs, left their mates, moved across country, and virtually started their lives over, all in one fell swoop.

  But there are many for whom that drastic approach would be neither comfortable nor appropriate.

  Where you start and how quickly you move along will depend to some extent on where you’re at in your life right now, as well as on the type of person you are.

  Obviously, there is no right or wrong way to begin the process of simplifying. If giant steps work for you, take them.

  If you’re not sure where to begin, creating the time to think about your life would probably be essential. Where you go from there and how quickly you do it will be up to you.

  THREE

  The Things That Really Matter

  20. You May Not Know What Really Matters

  According to a recent TIME/CNN poll, close to 65 percent of us spend much of our so-called leisure time doing things we’d rather not do. That is a staggering statistic, especially when you consider the incredible number of options that are available to us today.

  I think there are two reasons a lot of us aren’t doing the things we really want to do. First of all, many us don’t know what those things are.

  When I think back to my hectic lifestyle, I have to admit that one of the reasons I allowed my life to continue to be so complicated is that I hadn’t slowed down enough in recent years to figure out what I wanted to do, not only in terms of my work life, but in terms of a lot of my personal choices.

  I knew the basic things: I knew that Gibbs, and family, and special friends were important. I knew that for me, spending time in nature was important. I knew maintaining my health with exercise and an appropriate diet were important.

  But there were other areas, such as my life’s work and many social and leisure activities, I just sort of drifted along with because it was easier than taking the time to come up with alternatives.

  For any number of reasons we lose sight of what we want to do. Perhaps we weren’t encouraged as children to make our own decisions.

  Or maybe we have easygoing, compliant personalities and have gone along with what other people have wanted to do, or wanted us to do, for so long that we’ve forgotten what’s important to us.

  Or perhaps we never allowed ourselves to believe that doing the things we enjoy is even a possibility for us.

  If you’ve spent a lot of years not knowing what you really want to do, either in terms of your career or in terms of your personal, social, civic, or family life, it can seem like an impossible task to stop what you’ve been doing—or at least slow down for a bit—and figure it out. It often seems easier to keep on doing things we don’t want to do.

  Secondly, what we want to do can often be difficult to do.

  For example, if your deep, dark, hidden desire is to write the great American novel, it would seemingly require a major disruption in your life to arrange things so you could even get started on it. Often it’s easier to continue doing things you almost want to do, or don’t mind doing.

  So our lives get frittered away by a social engagement here, a luncheon there, an evening of television here, or the habit of working evenings or weekends or both on projects that we don’t have all that much interest in. And the things we really want to do, in our heart of hearts, get put on the back burner.

  One of the things simplifying your life will do is free up time for you to figure out what really matters to you, and then enable you to arrange your time so you can do it.

  21. Reexamine Your List of Goals

  Not being clear on what I wanted to do didn’t keep me from having lots of lists of things I thought I wanted to do. Paradoxically, it may have contributed to the length of my lists.

  When I made the decision to simplify my life, I had a full-sized three-ring binder time management system in which I had a goals page for each of the major areas of my life, including personal, career, social, financial, spiritual, and civic. In each of these categories I had a to-do list that included projects I thought I wanted to start.

  For example, my personal list included the following projects, among others:

  Start painting

  Start drawing

  Study landscape gardening

  Learn to write

  Join a choral group/study voice

  Learn Spanish. Brush up on French and German.

  Learn speed reading.

  Learn flower arranging, especially Ikebana

  Study art history

  Start bird watching

  Study the Middle East situation in depth

  Get into hang gliding

  Start writing letters

  Study screenwriting

  Study filmmaking

  Learn Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for Christmas recital

  Become a gourmet cook (!)

  Learn the basics of interior design

  Learn about growing roses

  Start mountain hiking

  This time management system also included the following: time lines with starting and completion dates and to-do sheets for each of the items within the above mentioned categories; a mission statement; a purpose statement; and a three-page constantly expanding reading list. It also, of course, had a two-page spread for every day of the year on which were outlined the activities connected with my daily schedule.

  Obviously, if I was going to simplify my life, one of the first things I was going to have to do was to reconsider my goals.

&nbs
p; Though it’s difficult for me to believe this now, before I simplified my life I was committed to the idea that I’d eventually—and sooner rather than later—be able to do all the things I had on these lists.

  If you’d asked me at that time what really matters, I’d have insisted that it all mattered. It never occurred to me to give up any of it.

  I look at this list now and I can laugh. The only reason I have the courage to reveal the absurdity of these lists is that now I know I was not alone. There are millions of other people out there who believe, as I did, that we can do it all, have it all, be it all. Or at least do most of it; and who perhaps even yet are carrying around similar lists—comparable in scope if not in content—in their leather-bound time management systems.

  I know that keeping lists can be beneficial in terms of helping us figure out what’s important. But if, as many of us did, you got carried away with your lists, you may have to reconsider and cut your lists back to more realistic proportions.

  I found this to be an ongoing process that unfolded over several years. I made continuous changes and adjustments to my lists as I learned how to be more realistic about the time we have available and to make wise choices among all the options we have to choose from, and as I got better about figuring out what it was I really wanted to do.

  If you never got into extensive list making, or were able to keep it under control, your job of simplifying may be easier than you thought.

  22. Zero In on Your Top Four or Five Priorities

  There were many intermediate steps along the way, but I have only one list now. It looks something like this:

  Spend time with Gibbs

  Pursue my writing career

  Have quiet time alone for my inner work

  Spend time with family and friends

  Have quiet time for reading and drawing