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| credit: Brooke McAllister |
Embarking on a journey toward simple living is to travel into uncertain terrain, especially when one is navigating only by the lay of one’s own land. It’s easy to feel you’ve taken the high moral road when comparing the ecological footprint of your family car (ours is a fifteen-foot long, fifty-three horse power Honda Civic) to David Geffen’s 453-foot, 50,000 horse power mega-yacht, but all self-righteousness is shattered to smithereens when comparing the self-same Civic to the family rickshaw in India. And, yes, my home might be modest in square footage by North American standards, but compared to an African mud hut, it is palatial.
Simplicity can be a bit of a tightrope walk with pitfalls of self-righteousness on one side and crippling guilt on the other. We can so easily end up like the friend of author Alan Durning, who aptly quipped, “I used to go on shopping trips, now I just go on guilt trips.” But despite the hazards, the journey of simplicity is worth taking if we are serious about making the connection between our everyday lives and the everyday lives of everyone and everything else in the world. In many ways, living more simply is the easiest and most practical thing the average North American can do to care for creation and their less fortunate planet-mates. Not many of us can trek to the Outer Hebrides to ring Storm Petrels or set up an orphanage in famine-ravaged Ethiopia, but all of us can shop a little less!
3 comments:
A fine reflection that takes me back to a sunny afternoon on the London Mennonite Centre lawn, nearly thirty years ago. It was a conversation with Alan Kreider about simplicity and community. Simplicity is still the thing - spirituality, lifestyle - but sometimes getting there is convoluted and complex.
I can think of moments with Red Kites or watching Gannets off Fedeland in Shetland, that are the nearest I've ever come to pure simplicity. Maybe it's that 'bullet and automatic purpose'.
I find this blog post so helpful. When I look at all that is not yet right in our world, and all that is not yet right within me, I am caught, at times, like a deer in the headlights. Your words offer a simple step forward to those of us caught by a thirsty for righteousness. Get rid of that which I do not need. By a little less.
The challenge of living simply is sometimes the tension in me to give up on having conveniences in my life. Should I take the public bus and give up owning a car? But it is so inconvenient for me to get to work, it means waking up at 5 am instead of 6 am if I drive. Should I buy a washing machine or go back to the days of my grandma when clothes were washed on a wooden washboard? The inconvenience of squatting and brushing with brude strength . I do not understand why people living in a tropical sunny island like mine need to buy a clothes dryer. Why can't we hang our clothes on a bamboo stick and let the sun dry them crisp? It's about convenience and the desire to get it done fast . As for me I have yet to own a clothes dryer or dish washer, but I am guilty of the other two luxuries in life!
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