Living the Simple Life

AN OVERVIEW

I first made the decision to start living a simpler life in the summer of 1990. Prior to that time I had spent roughly twelve years as a real estate investor. I worked ten-hour days buying, refurbishing, managing, and selling investment properties.

During the previous year I had organized a real estate seminar business, had written a book on real estate investing, and had just completed a national media tour to promote it.

My life was ruled by a black leather time management system that weighed five pounds and took up half my desk space. My day was driven by the classic prioritizing question, "What is the best use of my time right now?"

Sometime after college I began, as many of us did, to work at two speeds: faster and fastest. I moved at this pace from six in the morning until seven or eight o'clock at night for more years than I care to count.

It would probably be accurate to say that I had become a fairly typical urban professional on my own fast track.

Though my husband, Gibbs, who is older and wiser than I am, was never technically a yuppie, his life was complicated by the fact that he was married to one. And he, too, maintained a full career schedule as a magazine editor, while at the same time writing a series of adventure novels. He was also an active volunteer with various community organizations.

In addition to our time-consuming careers, we had all the other duties and responsibilities associated with maintaining our lives. Though my two stepsons—who had been with us on weekends for the previous eight years—were now out on their own, we still had four cats and a busy social life.

The gods must have been smiling on me in the summer of 1990. I stopped for five minutes in the middle of July that year, and in a quiet moment I looked at my time management system as though I were seeing it for the first time. As I went over the list of phone calls I had to make, the people I had to see, the places I had to go, and the things I had to do, all of a sudden a light bulb went on. I realized my life had become too complicated, and I made the decision then and there to start simplifying it.

I had finally reached a point where keeping up such a hectic pace no longer seemed worth it. It occurred to me that we had, through long hours and a lot of hard work, achieved a modicum of success. We had many of the trappings of the modern lifestyle, but we didn't have the time, and sometimes not even the energy, to enjoy them. And even worse, we had little time for each other, and practically no time for ourselves.

A large part of the dissatisfaction for me was that I had never particularly enjoyed my work. I had continued to do it because I hadn't a clue what else I might be able to do. At that moment it was unthinkable that I could change my career or cut back on my work schedule.

But I decided there were many other areas where we could begin to cut back. My first objective was to create some breathing space so we could start to figure out how we could do things differently.

And so we began the process of simplifying. In the first couple of months we eliminated a lot of the clutter that was taking up our time and energy, and we moved to a smaller home. Over the next couple of years we made significant changes in our household routines, our social lives, our entertainment patterns, our civic and volunteer schedules, our financial picture, our personal lives, and eventually even our work lives.

I then got the idea to write a book on the things we had done to scale back. That book, Simplify Your Life: 100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter, was published in May 1994. It outlines many of the steps Gibbs and I took to simplify.

In the process of simplifying the outer areas of our lives, we freed up close to thirty hours a week. This gave me the opportunity to begin the daunting prospect of thinking about making some career changes, and also the chance to address some of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual issues that had been bubbling beneath the surface of my fast-paced life, but that I'd seldom taken the time to explore.

I then decided to write a book that would discuss some of those issues. And so I wrote Inner Simplicity: 100 Ways to Regain Peace and Nourish Your Soul, which was published in May 1995.

When we first made the decision to simplify, we had no idea that we were in the beginning phase of a major national trend. We simply wanted to get out from under the complications that twelve fast-paced years had generated.

If you, too, are thinking about making some changes and simplifying, or have already started the process, you're not alone.

According to the Trends Research Institute of Rhinebeck, New York, a privately funded organization that forecasts and tracks changes in our culture, simplifying is one of the leading movements of the decade.

A 1995 nationwide survey of a cross section of Americans revealed that close to 30 percent of the respondents had voluntarily downshifted, and were working fewer hours for less pay so they could spend more time with their families.

Numerous other surveys have shown that anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of those questioned would be willing to accept a reduction in pay if they could work fewer hours.

This represents a major nationwide change in personal priorities. It says that many of us have had enough of the fast-paced, hard-working lifestyle that has become "the norm" over the last decade. It says millions of Americans want to live their lives differently.

The Trends Institute estimates that by the end of the decade, a total of 15 percent of the 77 million baby boomers will have made significant moves toward creating simpler lives, some voluntarily, others involuntarily.

When I wrote Simplify Your Life, I thought I was writing it for maturing yuppies, who, like Gibbs and me, had been seduced by both the work and the consumer culture in recent years, and who in the process of overdoing it, had begun to lose sight of the important things.

But based on the letters I receive from readers around the country, it would appear that the desire to simplify crosses most generational, economic, educational, and professional lines.

I hear from teenagers, single men and women, married couples, retirees, the affluent, the not so affluent, and people from every walk of life—teachers, nurses, computer specialists, actors, journalists, artists, psychotherapists, legislators, lawyers, corporate executives, police officers, students, and media personalities. They are among the millions of Americans who are reducing, voluntarily or otherwise, the hours they spend earning a salary, their housing requirements, and the money they spend on goods and services.

They, like Gibbs and me, are realizing that they've given up too much in the effort to have it all. The primary objective for most of them is to have more time for their own life dreams or for the people they love, and for doing the things they really want to do.

When you stop to think about it, it's not surprising that so many of us want to simplify. Never before in the history of mankind have so many people been able to have so much, go so many places, and do so many things. We've worn ourselves out trying to have it all.

And now we're ready to look at other options.

In Living the Simple Life, we'll explore what simple living means to different people and look at what complicates our lives, what we can eliminate, and ways we can play the game differently (Chapter One). I'll outline some ways to get started, especially for those who feel their lives are too complicated to even think about simplifying (Chapter Two), and for those who may not have stopped long enough recently to get in touch with what really matters to them (Chapter Three).

I'll point out some of the things Gibbs and I have learned over the past few years about having more time to call our own, and suggest how to deal with people who don't understand the desire to simplify (Chapter Four).

In my experience two major issues complicate our lives above all else. The first is our ongoing battle with consumerism and the stuff we've accumulated. As with any problem, awareness is the first step toward resolution. And so I'll share what we've learned about letting go of a lot of that stuff, and some of the ways we've dealt with the media-generated imperative to consume (Chapters Five and Six).

The second challenge is the tendency for many of us to say yes when we'd like to say no, a habit that affects all areas of our lives. In Chapter Seven, I'll discuss ways we've used to approach this.

One of the great dichotomies we face is that because our lives are so complicated we don't have time for ourselves and at the same time we often keep our lives complicated so we won't have to address some of our inner issues. I'll talk about this and some ways we can bring our outer and inner lives together in Chapter Eight.

Each passing year leaves us with personal, household, and lifestyle choices that can either simplify our lives or complicate them even further. In Chapters Nine and Ten, I'll share my experiences—as well as some readers' ideas—about these choices.

There is perhaps no one for whom the problems of consumerism and learning to say no are more important or more challenging than for parents. In Chapter Eleven, I'll combine my own observations with the wisdom of several readers and an expert or two to outline some ideas for simplifying with children.

Having no options complicates our lives. Having too many options complicates our lives as well. In Chapter Twelve, I'll discuss some ways I've learned to deal with the clothing options for women. In Chapter Thirteen, Gibbs discusses some things he's always known about clothing options for men.

I've also included a Reading List, a selection of books that explores some more of the organizational, financial, lifestyle, and work-related questions of living a simpler life.

An interviewer asked me recently if I was glad I made all these changes and had simplified my life. I said I was, absolutely.

Then she asked if I'd do it again. I said yes, absolutely. There's no way I'd ever want my life to be so complicated again.

Then she asked if I would have simplified if someone else had suggested it to me—before I came to the decision on my own. My initial reply was, probably not!

But as I thought about it some more, I realized that if someone had outlined easy changes I could make which would free up some time without derailing the rest of my schedule, I believe I would have paused long enough to consider them.

If someone had been able to show me that just by tweaking my daily routine I would have more time each week—not to work more but to play more and relax more—I like to think I'd have been open to that possibility.

If someone had pointed out that reducing the hours I spend in the office each day could actually make me more productive, I would have been open to experimenting with that.

If I could have seen that freeing up more time for leisure would help open me up to my creativity, which in turn would make it possible for me to move away from a career I'd never been happy in and into one that now is a constant source of joy… Well, I might have been skeptical, but because hope springs eternal, I'd have sought out that leisure time.

And if someone had convinced me that eventually I could use some of my newfound time to face the more difficult challenges I'd spent years avoiding—such as conquering my fears and learning to forgive—and that doing those things in turn would free me for unprecedented personal and inner growth, I like to think I'd have gone for it.

So that's what I'd like to do for you in Living the Simple Life. If you're just starting to consider the possibility of simplifying, I want to give you a glimpse of the tremendous freedom you'll experience when you start to eliminate some of the day-to-day complexities.

You'll see that simplifying is not necessarily about getting rid of everything we've worked so hard for. It's about making wise choices among the things we now have to choose from. It's about recognizing that trying to have it all has gotten in the way of enjoying the things which do add to our happiness and well-being. So it's about deciding what's important to us, and gracefully letting go of the things that aren't.

You'll see that simplifying is not necessarily about moving to Walden Pond and sending the laundry home to Mother. It's about simplifying our lives right where we are. It's about learning to reduce the laundering chore, along with all the other chores and frequently self-imposed obligations, so we can begin to make the contributions we all, in our heart of hearts, want to make to our family, to our community, to our environment, and to the world.

If you've already begun taking steps to simplify, Living the Simple Life will help you continue on your way, perhaps with some ideas you may not have thought of, and possibly with some different ways of thinking about the process.

If you've long been living the simple life, I hope you'll find here some reinforcement and even validation for the sometimes easy, sometimes difficult, but almost always rewarding choices you've made.

When you start slowing down, cutting back, creating time—real time for yourself—the important things become obvious. Once you simplify your life you begin, perhaps again, to do your best work. You can start, perhaps all over again, to live your best life, whatever that is for you.

Simplifying is not a panacea. It won't solve all the problems of our lives or of the world. But it's a good beginning.