I'm in the midst of one of my periodic life re-evaluations. These seem to occur every few years, and with varied results. The last occurred about four years ago, at a point where I was programming computers forty hours a week and working at Custom Box another twenty. It was too much for me. I retreated. I longed for a pastoral lifestyle.
During the next four years, I worked slowly (often unconsciously) toward that pastoral lifestyle. Now, to some extent, I have it. But it's not enough. I crave something even more relaxed, more peaceful, more removed. I don't want to walk some hypothetical fine line between the materialistic mainstream society and an idealistic simple life; I want to be lodged firmly in the latter world.
This isn't something that can be achieved overnight. And I find it unlikely I have the willpower (or desire) to shed the modern world completely — could I really give up the internet? — but I've made the first tentative steps toward this goal. I've begun a campaign of personal fiscal responsibility (one unprecendented in my own life). I've started looking toward what I already have instead of craving what I believe I need. My mind is working, undergoing a sort of mental restructuring, a realignment of my values and priorities.
I believe that during the next four years I will draw even closer to my ideal: a life of idleness.
A happy convergence of books and essays has helped solidify my thoughts and goals.
Mark Slouka's "Quitting the Paint Factory", from the November 2004 Harper's, is a semi-successful meditation on the subject. He writes: "If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power." If we are not idle, if we do not make time for ourselves, we become cogs in a corporate machine, simple consumers in a materialistic world. (Slouka's essay, while interesting, deteriorates in its latter half, becoming a baffling attack on George W. Bush and his policies. I abhor Bush, too, but fail to see how the President is in any way related to the topic. Slouka's case is incoherent.)
Slouka's article makes direct reference to Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness", from which comes this brilliant bit: "I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached."
Wendell Berry, another source of inspiration, provides a somewhat different view, and an important one to temper my desire to shed work. Berry praises work. But the work he praises is that of the self, the kind of work that is for the worker, performed by the worker for his own ends.
I've been re-reading Berry's What Are People For?, a collection of essays in which he argues that there's a cognitive disconnect between people and place, that our society has no concept of agriculture, that our consumerist culture loves technology for technology's sake, that we ought to think locally not globally. Berry is a visionary, one who will be more appreciated one hundred years from now than he is today. In a way, he's a modern-day Thoreau. (Here is a good place to start with Berry, if you're curious.)
These essays made my mind percolate. But what really set my brain to boil was the financial self-help book Your Money or Your Life, which advocates voluntary simplicity and sustainable living as a means to shed the bonds of consumerism. "The sirens of consumerism have put us into a deep sleep," the book claims. And "clutter is a fate worse than death". Its most important insight — the book's thesis, actually — is that "money is something we choose to trade our life energy for".
This fundamental principle has, at least for now, changed my relationship with money. Last year I spent $2500 on books. (Yes, it's true.) That's over $200 a month. This month, I've spent $28 on books, and even that little required colossal effort. (I purchased a Latin textbook and its companion workbook.) And that's the only money I've spent on myself this month. The only money. No candy, no movies, no magazines, no nothing. And you know what? Rather than feel deprived, I'm happier than I have been in years.
Now I'm reading Brenda Ueland's strangely compelling If You Want to Write: "A book about art, independence, and spirit". Another weblog — I forget which — linked to an excerpt from this book, and I liked the selection so much that I borrowed the book from the library.
It's an odd sort of writing book. Ueland doesn't tell you how to write; she just tells you to do it. "Everyone is talented, original, and has something to say," she argues, echoing the reasons I believe everyone should have a weblog. She wants each person to write with passion about what they know, never thinking of an audience, never thinking of publication, only thinking of themselves. Wonderful advice. And her philosophy is in lockstep with my recent thinking: "You should work from now on until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing or whatever work it is you care about."
Here's a quote I've had to edit (Ueland is even more prone than I am to parenthetical remarks):
...The great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoy...do not want security, egoistic or materialistic...They dare to be idle, not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. For great and creative men know what is best for every man is his own freedom so that his imagination...can grow in its own way, even if that way, to you or to me...seems very bad indeed.(I know its easy to mistrust such a patched quote, but I've done my best to retain its essential meaning. I had to edit, else the parenthetical remarks would have made the quote nearly nonsensical.)
These books and articles are laying a foundation upon which I hope to erect a new life, or a new approach to life. I realize that this new life may not last — my zeal may fade, my priorities may change, Fate may rear its ugly head — but for now, and for the foreseeable future, I intend to pursue a lofty goal:
Idleness.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — Brain Damage Dale was in my first or second grade class (I'm so old now that I've forgotten which). He was bright and funny and popular with both the teachers and the students. One day my teacher came in and she told us that while Dale had been riding his bike, he'd been struck by a car.
2003 — Sidetracked At 9 a.m. I left for the five-minute walk to Wilcox Arredondo.
Living simply seems to have emerged as a theme among my friends, especially those with children. A number of people have recommended to me the book "Living Simply with Children," although I haven't read it yet. I think I should even if we don't have a child because I think the principles apply to adult quality of life just as much as they do to that of children. Both Paul and I want to move towards a simpler life and we've made some strides but we have a long way to go. We don't make a car payment and have no revolving debt, just our student loans and soon, a mortgage. We have a savings account (soon to depleted by the impending mortgage). I have mixed feelings about the mortgage because it is a lot of money, but I know that I won't be happy unless I have the space I need to live the life I want to live, and that comes at a cost.
The last five years of the "good life," in which we had the good jobs and the money we never had before, have taught us that it isn't all that it is cracked up to be. We were constantly exhausted, took poor care of ourselves, and our overall satisfaction with life wasn't where we felt it should be. Looking back over my adult life, our time on Dryland Rd. was very satisfying. We were always broke yet my life was rich. I loved the garden, sitting in my weedy yard in the morning, looking at Mt. Hood, and having friends in for dinner because we rarely could afford to eat out.
Let's help support one another as we try to move towards the lives we really want.