Ten Ways to Simplify Your Life

It's a little out of character for me to do a list like this. But I've looked at many, many versions of this list in my recent journeys. And so it happened naturally that I came up with my own.

Here are Esther's ten tips for simplification. These can serve you (and me) whether we're working on the carbon footprint, or the monthly budget, or creating space for more spiritual pursuits.

1. Let Yourself Run Out of Things.

The day that you run out of ziplocs is the day that you figure out how to reuse the bread bags. And, on the day that you are running out of dish soap, you may find that you use only half as much.

2. Write it Down. Say it Out Loud. Hear Yourself Saying It.

"Purchased hot beverage...four dollars, seventy-five cents."

"Purchased hot beverage...one non-recyclable paper cup."

"Purchased hot beverage...9 minutes driving, 6 minutes in store = 15 minutes."

3. Do the Math.

Cost/Hourly Wage = Value in Work Hours

4. Use Your Imagination.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. "My life without this object/habit/distraction looks like..."

5. Share.

Kim and Rick share their car. Elaine shares her house. It's generosity and simplicity at the same time. Or, you could say, free storage for your things when you aren't using them.

6. Take the Challenge.

Some people do crossword puzzles. Some people do Sudoku. Some people come up with creative ways to simplify their lives.

7. Make Tiny Changes.

Failure isn't fun. Don't set yourself up.

8. Keep the Chaos, Lose the Container.

Every kind of chaos can be contained...in the appropriate container. If your stuff won't stay where you put it, you might need to change where you put it. If you can't get yourself on time, you might need to change the schedule. If you keep the container the same and try to change the chaos instead? You might make yourself very tired.

9. Don't Have Stuff You Can't See.

If you can't see it, you don't use it. And if it isn't a part of your life, why is it a part of your life? See Item #4. Are you going to need it later? See Item #5. But you really, really, love it? Then bring it out and let it make you happy.

10. Keep a List of Things You Don't Want To Do, But Are Going to Do Anyway.

Avoidance wastes resources. Admit that you don't feel like doing it. Pout for as long as you need to. And then get it off the list.

Rest

Where There is No Path

I had planned this morning to write you a post about information. I thought I might title it, "A Shout Out to People Who Know Things," and I would, in my usual meandering way, discuss the intellectual honesty that is coming to my house as a not-so-welcome guest of my experiment. I am preparing to lose the ability to look up any piece of information anytime. This is to say that I am preparing to lose the ability to pretend I know things. Without Google, I can't casually list the number of legislators in the combined houses of Congress, 535, as I did in an essay-post last week. Without Google, I can't resolve a dinner table disagreement over whether it was rampion or arugula that Rapunzel's mother so fatefully craved from the witch's garden across the wall. I can't finish the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle. And I can't instantly learn how to get a white heat ring off of my dining room table. (Iron, wool setting, through two layers of white t-shirt, presto, thank you internet!)

What will I do without my ability to look up wonderfully useful items of information like that? Have to watch where I'm putting my coffee in the first place?

It's Saturday today. And, like last Saturday, I'm feeling overly earnest, and exhausted. I keep drifting away from my discussion of Wikipedia, in which I'm trying to endow the phenomenon of user-generated encyclopedia with a degree of influence that it may not particularly deserve. "What does it all mean?" I hear myself asking. "How can I make this mean something?"

And I'm trying to find a way to fit in a picture of a handmade birdhouse, which Milo and I rescued from the thrift store along with our mismatched stationery and forgotten postcards. The picture doesn't do it justice. Someone made it. And painted it. And I found it at the thrift store for 3.99 and fell in love with it, and am now learning (from the internet) how to use it to attract a mating bird couple to our front yard.

And I'm tamping down a very small but creeping sense of dread.

This may not work.

This is not, please -- not at all -- a fear that I can't do my Year Without Internet. For God's sake, I can do it. But I am a little bit afraid that it won't help.

As I mentioned, it's Saturday, and that means my husband has been gone all week (and is asleep right now.) And I'm feeling like little Milo, who woke up too late to see Daddy before work a few mornings ago -- which means that he wouldn't see him at all that day -- and ran like a dramatic heroine to the front window, crying, "No working, Daddy! No working!" It was exactly the same tone of voice that he uses when I refuse to let him have a second cookie. But I don't care too much about cookies, and in that case when he cries, "I want it, I want it!" he isn't speaking also for my heart.

We can't explain this yearning away by saying that I don't have community, because I do. My brother and my niece each come over at least once a week, and they also babysit. I am not housebound. I have hobbies, I have a couple of interest groups, and I have a church. Yesterday I dropped the kids off at Jacob's house and went to Mt. Auburn to meet D.W. Jacobs and a couple of folks from Arena Stage at the grave of R. Buckminster Fuller. It isn't that I'm bored.

But I have space in my life. That's what small children require of you. They force you to make space for them, and then they don't fill it. And as much as I've adulated open space, it is also terrifying. It is often lonely. And it's silent. And sometimes, I think, it gives you knowledge of yourself you didn't really want to have.

I've been making a brave stand here against the big bad wolf, the internet. It's going to be SO hard. I'm going to be SUCH a hero. But my personal journey has very little to do with the internet, in itself. Can high speed information access really make a difference to whether you stand firm in your loneliness or run away from it? Can the absence of it really teach you to stand firm in any and all of your imperfections? Can turning off the computer possibly teach you to stop running away from your life?

In the hero's journey, growth always begins with a pilgrimage: like the Grail knights, into the darkest part of the wood, where there is no path. In the context of my real SAHM life, I think Jennifer described it well as, "My Year Under a Rock." In this modern era, that is where the darkness lies -- the quiet of the soul. It's under a rock, and I'm going to look for it.

The question is, in a year or so, when it isn't so eminently sensible (or even possible?) for me to stay at home with the kids, can I return to the world/internet/workforce with a greater sense of balance? Can I return with a greater appreciation for humanity and humility and spirituality and personal journey and all the little details of life that I forgot because I was glued to the computer, constantly scanning cyberspace for a quick ticket to resolving the inherent difficulties of this one great difficulty, life?

In this way I have an appreciation for accountability, in the sense that I won't always have access to a myriad of experts to help me fix my careless errors. And I have an appreciation for humility, in the sense that if I don't know something I will have to ask. I will have to raise my hand in class, as it were, and say to another person, "You know that. And I don't."

No epiphanies. No miracles. Just a lot of work to do to change my habits, with some short term consequences and, maybe, some long-term rewards.

Open Space

The second person I talked to about my Year Without Internet was my big sister, Dolly. As big sisters sometimes do, she started organizing me. "You'll need some criteria for deciding what you can and can't do," she said. "What are your criteria?"

Internet, no. Cellphone, no. Land line, yes. Ability to dial 9-1-1 if one of my kids chokes on a penny, yes. Computer, yes. The ban is on digital communication. Only, wait, that isn't accurate because land line phones are digital now. No, the ban is on portable, instantaneous communication. Walkie talkies are right out.

"You'll have to decide what you're going to do for entertainment," Dolly said, "besides the kids. Otherwise you'll go crazy."

I disagreed. I disagreed so much that I interrupted. "I don't think so." I think the entertainment IS what makes me crazy. Addicted and crazy. Addicted to being crazy.

I remembered my Aunt Mary's complaint regarding the half day drive with my dad from Boise, Idaho to their mother's nursing home in northern Utah (pictured here). "He doesn't like to talk," she said. "And he doesn't like to listen to the radio. So I'm sort of..." She grimaced and made a twiddling gesture with her hands.

I'm with my dad on that one. I like the drive across Kansas, and would prefer not to have it interrupted. Are we built differently from other people? Born under a different star? Made fit to tolerate silence? Or has there been some grain of separatism in the mechanism of our lives, behavior patterns that we acquired somewhere off the beaten path, that have taught us this aptitude for stillness? I don't mean to stray into nature vs. nurture here, but I wonder: Is this a trait? Or a practice?

People occasionally try to save me from my puritan tendencies. One beloved friend (and you know who you are, lady) tends to encourage me to let my toddler watch videos. I do sometimes let him watch videos. An example is our adventurous drive from San Diego to Boston, during which I gave exactly as much brain space to charging the DVD player as I did to keeping my gas tank full.

"There's nothing wrong with it," my friend says, meaning television, "and it can give you a bit of a break." She may be thinking to herself that I'm a perfectionist (which I am) and a control freak (which I am) and I just need to be reminded to relax.

But for me TV is not relaxing. Even the sound of it in another room tends to affect me for the worse. It's just too emotionally loud, too effectively geared to manipulate, for me to let it fade into the background. I know this because my resting state is without TV. And I'm here to test a muddy hypothesis that internet is doing the same thing.

It might go without saying here that my sensitivity to informational noise is informed by the struggle to generate art. I won't go into the chicken and egg question of whether my sensitivity came from trying to make art or trying to make art came from the sensitivity, but clearly I have both.

Theatre folk know well the first couple of sentences of Peter Brooks' book The Empty Space:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.

I think (hope?) I'm creating an empty space.

Do other makers of pictures and manipulators of ideas out there find that your creative state is adversely affected by informational noise? Magazines, advertisements, talk radio, worries...phone calls from your mom? Or maybe you find the opposite: it's difficult to get moving on a project without some good internet-style instant feedback. Like, say, you might want to blog for a while -- a month or so, maybe -- to kick up some ideas for a book?