When the Student is Ready...

I thought I'd give a bit of background about how I came to learn about simple living and began this journey of reading, thinking and acting.

It's funny how ideas come along at just the right time, or how we miss them if the time isn't right. For example, one of the books I chose for my thesis was Ben Okri's The Famished Road (this is a gorgeous book, by the way, as long as you like getting lost in endless sentences and paragraphs of beautiful prose). I thought that I discovered it in the summer of 1996 when a lecturer at St Andrews mentioned it to me. However, a year or two later, I was looking through my notes from my 1994 comparative lit class in college. We had a presentation on postcolonial literature and I had written in the margin 'Ben Okri, The Famished Road'. It gave me such a tingle to see those words written there. At the time they meant little, but reading them later made it feel like it had been foretold that I would study this novel. Really, though, I think it demonstrates the adage alluded to in this post's title 'when the student is ready the teacher appears'. The teacher drifted by in 1994, but it wasn't until 1996 that I was ready to bring the message to life. Then later I was given the exciting moment of recognition when reading my old notes.

Back to simple living. A couple of years ago a friend of mine (who has been the catalyst for all sorts of important discoveries, though we're not particularly close) mentioned the phrase 'simple living' to me and sent me to http://www.simpleliving.net/. For some reason, the idea spoke to me and I started checking books out of the library. I believe I started with Choosing simplicity : real people finding peace and fulfillment in a complex world by Linda Breen Pierce. I was struck by how diverse the stories were; it was a comfort to learn that I wouldn't need to grow my own food and live out in the country in order to practice simple living.

Certainly, the experience of getting to the end of my thesis and realising that what I thought I'd wanted wasn't at all what I wanted anymore gave me the freedom to look at the structure of my life in a new way. When I started reading about simple living I thought, 'There are other people who approach the world this way!' It's so important to me to live authentically, by that I mean living according to my values.

I moved on from Choosing Simplicity to that simple living classic Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. What an eye opener! I'd never specifically looked at my spending as a way to reflect my values. Though there are some parts of the book that don't resonate with me, I grabbed onto the idea that if an expense is very aligned with our values and makes us feel wonderful about it, we should consider spending MORE on it. Such a different message from one that says all spending is evil or money itself is evil. I loved the idea of 'enoughness' and that every individual and family must decide what that means for him/her/them. I had also never thought of the idea of a 'real hourly wage', including travel, decompression time, meals out when it's only because we're too tired to cook, etc.

I have used many of these principles to guide my own finances and decisions. It was validating to learn that I had already instinctively made some good choices about my work and home life based on my values, but also rewarding to have new tools to make these decisions conscious.

As for my friend who pointed me in the direction of simple living? She hasn't pursued it to nearly the degree I have. Perhaps she was led to it so she could guide me as well as explore it herself later...