This
month I have been posting a different thing I am thankful for each day on Facebook. Even on bad days, it was a wonderful practice
to stop and think of one thing that brought me true joy and happiness. While reviewing
that list, I realized not a single one on my list was any possession I
owned. A summary of my list: my husband,
family, friends, church community, and my dog. One of my all-time favorite reads
is Mother Teresa’s A Simple Path.
She says that the opposite is in fact true – the more “things” you have,
the unhappier you are."When you don't have anything, then you have everything." I’m going to agree with her on this one.
Over the last few years, I have been
moving steadily through different phases in order to achieve a more simplistic
lifestyle. For a while now I have been
going through the “buy only used items” stage (except for things like
toothbrushes…). There have been a couple
of reasons for it. First, since my husband and I are both in grad school full
time, we make next to nothing. Grad
school is a great way to cut your spending habits. Second, I have become increasingly concerned
about the ecological impact the American standard of living is having on the
world (for goodness sakes, we use a quarter of the world’s resources and make
up only 4% of the world’s population).
Besides being concerned with the environment for its own sake, the
people who will be most affected by these types of decisions are the poor – in this
country and all over the world. Third,
the more information I have about where most of my stuff comes from, the heavier
it sits on my conscious. I should not
and cannot help sustain large populations of people (especially children!) who
are put into dangerous and terrible situations in sweatshops to make a shirt
for me (Mother Teresa says,"When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed."). Fourth, the money can be put to better use than buying
another thing I don’t need. There are quite a few more, but these are some of
the major reasons I am working on scaling back my lifestyle.
I think some of my heroes like
Mother Teresa were on to something with their vow of poverty. An example that always jumps to my mind when
I think of simplicity is a trip my friend and I took a few years ago. We were
going to be gone for several weeks, so I packed my suitcase to the brim. It was
exhausting lugging around a huge suitcase, digging through tons of things to
find my toothbrush, and I couldn’t help but scatter things everywhere as I
tried to find something in my bag. I
didn’t think too much about it because that is just simply how a person travels. One day, though, we filled a backpack each
with a single change of clothes and a few basic things. We locked our suitcases
in a storage room at a hostel, and we took off to go exploring. We rented
mopeds and just went wherever the wind would take us. To my dying day one of my
favorite images will be my friend on her moped in front of me with her backpack
on, with the Mediterranean Sea on one side and tall hills topped with ancient ruins
on the other. We were gone for a few days and one of the best parts of that
trip was how little stuff we had. We could go and do what we wanted because of
how little held us down. When I think of
living a life free of clutter, useless items, and freedom, this is the image my
mind conjures, not a life that is somehow lessened because I own fewer material
possessions.
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