More on simple living

As I mentioned two blogs ago, simple living is more than just cutting back on "stuff". It also involves cutting back on other forms of clutter: not cluttering our minds with all sorts of miscellaneous thoughts; not cluttering our hearts with envy, comparisons, greed; not cluttering our lives with so many activities that we can no longer see the big picture.

Choosing to live simply in this way is also very hard to do. When we are active and busy, we can ignore uncomfortable feelings, unresolved personal problems, and lack of direction in our lives. It is also easier to ignore the suffering in the world or to feel we have to take any responsibility for it with our personal choices or our actions.

But for most people, I think that finally catches up with us. When we are sick, for example, and unable to run around, we may find ourselves not only filled with a physical illness but bombarded with feelings and even an emptiness that we can't name. At the end of a person's life, we know that too many times there are regrets, regrets that might have been avoided if the person had just slowed down, simplified enough to listen to the inner voices that call us to move in a new or different direction. At points in a person's life sometimes there is a sense of pointlessness looking back, opportunities missed to help others, to help the world. Again, opportunities that if we lived more simply we might have seen or heard or noticed.

It is a paradox of life that when we live more simply, we are better able to see the big picture of the world's needs, sorrows and our ability to make a difference. But it is a reality. It takes the time and energy of slowing down, it takes the commitment to stop and look around you, it takes simplifying to see the complexity that is our world and to strive to do something to help move it towards wholeness.

There are so many things we can do to help the world and almost all of it also involves simplifying our lives:

1. Use less resources: waste less, destroy less trees by using less paper products, recycle more, reuse more.
2. Buy domestic: wasting less gas and fuel, supporting local farmers, encouraging in-country self-sufficiency.
3. Walk more: again, using less fuel, getting exercise, breathing the air.
4. Watch less TV: spend more time on your family, on learning, on BEing rather than drowning out the thoughts and feelings of this world with noise.
5. Stop addictions: cutting back on things like coffee (or chocolate!) and deciding instead to use that money as a pledge to help others, giving to a favorite charity, helping someone on the street, giving a gift to a child.

That's probably enough for today. Those are my challenges to myself today. I need to slow down, to look around, to remember the big picture and to help someone else. Good goals that will not only serve the world, but will serve each of us doing these as well.
in peace,
Barbara