Posts tagged with "simplicity"

Involuntary Simplicity

White is the new green. Since the snow arrived, we have been, in our small neighbourhood, summarily conscripted to the sustainability movement. The recalibration effect of being snowbound for a fortnight has taken us back to simpler pleasures and more sustainable ways of living. Our cars, looking like big, badly bubble-wrapped packages, are littered round the roadside, going nowhere. Work has been done from home, provisions have been communally organised.  We have renewed our sense of community. So would we become volunteers when the thaw sets in and we regain freedom of movement and choice? Would I?

The positives are piling up: walking daily in the fresh air through pristine snow: being creative with basic ingredients: not spending money: undertaking immediate and necessary physical tasks: getting satisfaction from eking out resources; tearing up the diary and living in the moment; appreciating home comforts; being a neighbour and citizen not a consumer.

So what’s not to like when the ice melts? Where is the rub in the rural idyll? Hardship does not come into it. It has only been two weeks. Isolation has hardly been the issue either. With broadband and mobile phones, television and radio, we have as much contact as we want with the rest of the world.  We have always rated home cooking more highly than eating out. Social life has continued in a different form. Cosy chats in the kitchen instead of the glamour of the urban gin palaces and tinselled emporia.

But it’s worth thinking about the potential barriers to signing up to this lifestyle for the longer haul: it is no surprise that the ego is beginning to look for a get out of jail card. The ego rails against the restriction on freedom, the compromised autonomy and the limitation of choice represented by no quick getaways in the car, no ordering online (no point, no post) and no exotica in the supermarket when we eventually manage to get there.  Limes and coriander are the new basics aren’t they? The ego was never going to like being buried in snow for long.

 And there is something else: lack of novelty is harder to pin down but has something to do with the constant influx of the new in one’s life, new ideas, the next big thing, new copy, new stuff, the ever changing stimuli needed to feed restless appetites, self-expression through knowing, having and being the latest, the most original, the best.

So one of the most challenging aspects of voluntary simplicity is coming to terms not just with not needing new stuff (several little black dresses are partying on their own in the wardrobe with nowhere to go), but also the more subtle things like not getting to the coolest café, not knowing about the next big thing, withdrawing from the frontline of recognition. “I’m out there, therefore I am” might have to become, “I am secure in myself, therefore I am”. That really would be le dernier cri.

Footnote: the secret of happiness has now been revealed; the secret of happiness is, as previewed by one of our group in Knoydart, a dry pair of socks.