Simply Saving

Do You Need to Balance Your Life?
by Maurine Patten

Living in a world that keeps changing almost faster than time itself, most of you are aware of the time squeeze to get things done. The pressures at work can easily carry over into personal life and vise versa. Parents, especially, find themselves drained physically, mentally, and emotionally at the end of a day.

When you have many things to do running around in your mind, you can easily feel overwhelmed. To remedy this, it is important to strive for balance and to stay focused. However, sometimes these two goals are in conflict.

You may have experienced times when you focused on something and lost your balance. This can happen when there are too many things to do and not enough time to get everything done. At this point, some of you may make lists, which can be helpful.

In addition to lists, the following plan will help you consider what needs to be done and how each item is tied to your values:

• Set up a 4-cell grid.

• The two cells across the top (left to right) are labeled “Urgent” and “Not Urgent”.

• The two cells going down (top to bottom) are labeled “Important” and “Not Important”.

• Place all of the things you have to do into one of these cells.

Filling in these four squares helps you establish your priorities according to your values, be more focused, and feel more in control of your life. Now you are ready to look at how to increase the feeling of balance in your life.

When there is not enough time to accomplish as much as you had hoped to do in a day, it is even more important to select one or two of the following suggestions to create a feeling of inner balance:

1. Count your blessings by writing down three things you are grateful for and why (because) at least three times a week. It helps the most when you are having a tough day.

2. Practice “savoring” the joys of life instead of “stewing” on problems. Notice an increase in energy when you are savoring even momentary pleasures.

3. Spend time and energy with family and friends. Strong personal relationships bring a high level of satisfaction with life.

4. Write a gratitude letter to someone whom you are grateful for in your life. If possible, visit the individual and read the letter to him or her. If a visit is not possible, you can email it, call the person or send it by mail. Notice how you feel after doing this.

5. Take care of yourself physically. Even 10-15 minutes of exercise and/or meditation can release tension. Get plenty of sleep, and make healthy food choices to have the energy that you need.

6. Be sure to find time to laugh and catch yourself smiling.

Hopefully, choosing to do some of these ideas for balance will be renewing, increase your energy, and help you focus.

In addition, the 4 square grid will help you to prioritize the things you need/want to accomplish. This clarity helps energize and motivate you to make the most of your available time. It also increases your confidence in the choices you are making. What choices are you going to make that will help you focus and keep your balance?

Maurine Patten, Ed.D., CMC, Maximize Your Possibilities

http://www.PattenCoaching.com

Mailto:mdpcoach@pattencoaching.com
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Idea of simple life takes hold
By Elizabeth Weise for USA TODAY

It began as a simple, or simply terrifying, pledge taken by a small group of friends feeling overwhelmed by all the things in their lives. Over a potluck dinner two years ago, they made a pact: Buy nothing new except food, medicine and toiletries for six months.

The effort lasted a year before falling victim to the demands of modern life. But the commercial craziness of the Christmas season brought the group back together a few months ago.

Only now they’re not toiling in relative anonymity. A whiff of media interest over the past month has turned their tool-sharing, library-going, thrift-store-shopping band into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon with more than 700 members joining through their Yahoo website. Groups are meeting in Maine, Alabama, Texas, Oregon and Wisconsin, and satiated consumers in Japan and Brazil are making inquiries.

The original group named itself the Compact after the Mayflower Compact, a civil agreement that bound the Pilgrims to a life of higher purpose when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

The goal of the members wasn’t so much to save money, or even the environment, as much as it was to simplify their lives, says Rob Picciotto, a high school French teacher who attended that first potluck. “It saved us time because there was less time spent shopping. We still buy groceries and go to the drugstore, but we don’t go to Target on a Saturday, which was a ritual before just to see what the sales were,” he says.

It was Picciotto’s partner, John Perry, employed in high-tech marketing, who initiated the reincarnation of the Compact, an effort that drew the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle. When an article hit the paper’s website on Feb. 13, it became apparent that the Compact had tapped into a very deep stream of consumer discontent.

Today the Compact exists as several local potluck groups who meet to celebrate their successes (a free sewing machine from online Craig’s List) and dilemmas (Do new keys count? What about makeup?). A national and several state-based Web discussion groups serve the same purpose electronically.

Joining is simple, says Julie Fitzpatrick, a third-grade teacher from Madison, Wis., who signed up on the Internet site the day she heard about it on the news. There’s no ceremony involved. “You just say ‘I’m going to do it,’ ” she says.

She has found being in the Compact helpful when she is invited to direct-sale events such as candle or Tupperware parties. “I can say, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve taken a pledge.’ So now I’m out of that circle.”

Still, it’s not easy to refrain from the great American pastime. The desire for new sunglasses was the downfall of Sarah Pelmas, a high school English teacher, when she joined the group two years ago. “It was killing me,” she says. Finally she broke down and bought a pair, stepping onto the “slippery slope” that brought her back into mainstream consumerism. “It was like vegetarians and bacon,” she says: You can’t just stop at a taste. But she re-enlisted in December.

Not that the idea is embraced by everyone. In Chilliwack, British Columbia, Tira Brandon-Evans says that when she and her husband told friends they weren’t going to exchange Christmas and birthday presents, they acted as if she’d suddenly developed a mental illness.

She jokes that from her friends’ reactions, you would have thought she had announced plans to have a sex change or join a satanic cult.

The biggest challenge for San Franciscan Rachel Kesel was a camping trip, which “takes a lot of gear.” But for a fall outing, the 25-year-old student called friends to borrow what she needed. It worked out great, “because it’s so rare that you’re using camping gear at the same time as everybody else.”

Dorice Baty of Monett, Mo., says her family was forced into “involuntary simplicity” when her husband lost his job two years ago. The couple now get by on her salary as a substitute teacher. She likes sharing ideas on how to get by without buying with people in the Compact, whether rich or poor.

“If someone is wealthy and they’re doing this, God bless them,” she says. “If they’ve taken on the challenge, then I admire them as much as the people like me who are struggling.”

But to many, the entire notion seems strange, even downright un-American. Compacters interviewed on the radio have been accused of wanting to destroy the country. Bloggers have attacked the idea as “conspicuous anti-consumerism” and “pretentious.”

Compacter James Glines of Copperas Cove, Texas, says relatives have asked him, “How can you do that? Are you going to steal?”

But there’s a strong history of frugality in the USA, says David Shi, president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., and author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Religious groups such as the Shakers, the Mennonites, the Amish and some Quakers have long embraced the notion of living a simpler life. Writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau idealized it.
Shi says that for the past decade, Americans have been turning toward “therapeutic simplicity.”

“It’s a function of individuals beginning to feel a sense of crisis in their lives,” Shi says. “The frenetic pace of our high-tech society, coupled with the barrage of seductive messages coming from our consumer culture, have reached a point that many people simply feel like they’re about to self-destruct.”
For Pelmas, it’s about “avoiding the hysteria that seems to govern a lot of our consciousness right now around consumerism. It’s the kind of craze where fathers are beating each other up to get the latest Nintendo for their kids. It strikes me as some strange kind of 21st-century spiritual lack.”

It’s not just her. Surveys done by Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College who studies consumer society, have found that 81% of Americans say the country is too focused on shopping and spending, and 88% think it is too materialistic.

The Compacters are simply the most recent manifestation of a kind of underground mass movement, Schor says. She studies the “downshifter movement” that began in the 1980s with people making choices about earning and spending less money so they could focus on the quality of their lives and their families, typically by working fewer hours or changing jobs.

In 2003, USA TODAY columnist Craig Wilson vowed to buy nothing but food, toiletries and gifts for a year. The column “had one of the largest reader responses ever. Thousands and thousands of readers e-mailed me,” Wilson says.

Just this month saw publication of a whole book about a year without buying. Judith Levine had her own “no more” moment in 2004 and went on to write Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. There’s even a glossy magazine called Real Simple that taps into the trend, although its focus is more on buying things to make life simpler rather than not buying things.

They’re all onto something, says James Roberts, a professor of marketing at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “The research is overwhelmingly clear,” he says. “The more materialistic you are, the less happy you are. We get happiness through love of others and sense of community. But we’ve been told by Madison Avenue that happiness can come through the mall.”

For Glines, joining the Compact was about taming the need for the new. “I wanted ways to be frugal without cutting into my kids’ happiness,” he says.
But it’s harder in central Texas than San Francisco, where thrift stores are hip, and people put on things like the “Really Really Free Market” at a park once a month. At that urban potluck picnic, people bring what they don’t need and take what they do.

It’s hard but not impossible, Glines found. Putting in a raised vegetable garden, he was stymied by a lack of nails. But new houses are going up all over the place in Copperas Cove. “I talked to some of the builders, and they had half clips of nails from nail guns they were just throwing away, and they said I could have them. “I just popped them off, and there were my nails,” he says.

For Pelmas, the Compact kept a lot of things out of her life but did bring in something very important — a husband. She had met Matt Eddy, a high school science teacher, through friends several years before, but when she asked him out, he said no. “Then a year later, he was having dinner with some friends, and they said, ‘Oh, Sarah’s part of this Compact where she doesn’t buy anything new.’ Eddy, with his great love of environmental science, instantly rethought his rejection. He called Pelmas, and as she puts it, “the rest was history.” They were married 18 months later. The couple just bought a 1920s house that they plan to bring up to snuff using only recycled materials.
After all, she says, “it’s a used home.”

Simplicity as a Life-style: 10 Practical Steps
by Gwen Nyhus Stewart

There is a relatively new phenomenon in North America called ‘voluntary simplicity.’ The term ‘voluntary simplicity’ is used to describe a process whereby people opt out of the harried life of modern day living, and chose to live a life of frugality. Frugality in this sense doesn’t mean poverty rather, it means, enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy and from everything you have the use of. Frugal is characterised by or reflective of economy in the expenditure of resources.

Simplicity means making time for yourself in a hectic world. You clear out what is superfluous and make room for a life of passion, depth, and joy. As people become more and more stressed out from the pace of modern life and as we become increasingly concerned about the price of our over-consumption of the planet’s resources, the movement to living in a state of ‘mindfulness’ has increasing interest as a chosen life-style. To be mindful means to dwell deeply in the present moment knowing there is only one opportunity and it will never come again.

Voluntary simplicity comes from within. It is a social movement of a more sustainable, gratifying, and spiritually connected existence. Voluntary simplicity is a matter of personal responsibility and conscious awareness of how we live on the planet. It means identifying the difference between our needs and our wants. Needs are those things that are necessary for our survival – food, clothing, and shelter. Wants are all the other things we desire and to a large extent are driven by media advertising. Simplicity as a life-style is the identifiable difference between needs and wants, and the awareness of the cost in terms of our life force energy and our willingness to pay the price.

Pursuing a Life of Simplicity

The Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ is composed of two characters: heart and killing. When I first read this, I thought of the many people who are ‘too busy’ to make that phone call to someone they love and then one day it is too late; the many children who get gifts and/or money instead of their parents’ time and then one day they leave home and it is too late; the many times we have an opportunity to touch someone’s life with kindness but we are ‘too busy’ and the moment never comes again and it is too late.

As we search for meaning in our lives, we start to become aware of the emptiness and shallowness of a life based on materialism and consumerism. We become aware of the tremendous expenditure of our ‘life force energy’ to just keep up with the daily ‘rat race.’ We start the search for a life of deeper meaning and ask ourselves ‘what gives us joy?’ We realise we don’t know and can’t answer the question but we feel a yearning in our hearts for a sense of connection, a sense of purpose, and the sense that our life matters. The question demands an answer. We discover that all the myths such as: get a job, get married, have children, buy a mortgage with a two-car garage, and you will be happy, makes us wonder what is the matter with us when we feel the increasing futility of it all. The emphasis on externally meeting our needs leaves a ‘hole in our soul’ as we consume more and more and feel less and less satisfied. Consume by definition means to do away with completely; destroy – to spend wastefully; and squander – use up. Is consumed by our meaningless and frenzied consumerism a description that all too closely resembles most our lives?

What we don’t realise is that we are spiritual beings, in a physical body, having a human experience, and when we don’t connect the internal (spiritual) and the external (physical), our lives increasingly lose a sense of balance or harmony. There is literally no distinction between the outer and the inner when our lives are in balance, and as we seek this stability, where do we start? We start by examining our expectations and assumptions including the belief systems that drive us to live our lives ‘zombie-like’ without determining whether or not we want to play this game. We move towards consciously asking the questions about how much of our ‘life force energy’ we are prepared to exchange for the material goods we consume. This expenditure of ‘life force energy’ includes the storing, cleaning, insurance costs, maintaining, etc. all the stuff that clutters our lives.

Practical Steps to Simplifying Your Life

1. Reuse paper bags, envelopes, newspapers, etc. Newspapers and shredded paper make excellent mulch in the garden. The mulch will break down over a period of time and add humus to the soil. (Don’t use coloured flyers.)

2. Have a Buy Nothing Day.

3. Carve some space for ‘mindful living’ so that you have time for ‘beingness’ rather than ‘doingness.’

4. Find friends who know the glass is half-full or in other words, find friends who share the same value system as you do.

5. Grow your own food or buy as much as possible from local growers.

6. Use non-toxic products such as borax, vinegar, baking soda, lemon, and salt in your home, yard, and garden.

7. Before you buy something, write the item down on a note and if you still want it after a month, purchase it then.

8. Decide what is really working in your life and let go of that which no longer serves you.

9. Surround yourself with what you really need and love.

10. Go Organic. Organic gardening is not only about the avoidance of chemicals, but in the larger picture, it is organic living using Nature’s laws.

Gwen Nyhus Stewart, B.S.W., M.G., H.T., is an educator, freelance writer, garden consultant, and author of the book The Healing Garden: A Place Of Peace – Gardening For The Soil, Gardening For The Soul. She owns the website Gwen’s Healing Garden where you will find lots of free information about gardening for the soil and gardening for the soul. To find out more about the book and subscribe to her free Newsletter visit http://www.gwenshealinggarden.ca
Gwen Nyhus Stewart © 2004 – 2007. All rights reserved. Article Source: Sustainable Living Articles