Simplifying Spiritually

 Here are the first three spiritual items to work on:

•  Be more positive.
• Encourage rather than discipline.
• Be patient and more relaxed.

I plan on improving these areas by waking up each morning and starting it off in peace (I get the first hour alone if I am up by my 5:00a target). During my morning I can visualize how today can be great, how today can impact the kids’ lives and what my real role is as a dad. Throughout the day I plan on taking 3 or 4 breaks to get outside for 10 minutes. Get outside and enjoy the peace of the country: the sounds, smells and beauty.

• I will schedule 2 or 3 relaxation breaks for 5 minutes.
• I will take a break from cell phones and computer. 
• I will sit in quiet and breath deep.

After I feel that I have rebalanced by spiritual health, I can begin to enjoy everything more, but I need to improve myself first.

6 Week Update

This week was Week 6 of our move. The simpler things have started to take grip and my stress level is at 50% from two months ago. My to-do list is getting more difficult to create because I don’t have much to put on it. Meaningless duties have disappeared. I’ve had time to wake up in the morning and think. I can refresh my mind rather than jump into work and task lists. This week I took time to combine several of the “simplify” blogs we have been reading into an organized spreadsheet. Each idea is categorized into one of my six Life Balance Wheel areas: Physical Environment, Financial, Fun, Health, Social and Spiritual.

We’ve made a lot of improvements in our physical environment by de-cluttering when we moved (still more to come) and our health over the past year by changing our diet. The two areas that still remain unbalanced are financial and spiritual. I am going to put financial aside for the next few months because it will get worked out during the next year. If not completely, we will be in a much better situation because we moved away from our $2,000 mortgage to a $600 rental. The main area that I need to rebalance is Spiritual. I need to realign my mind and attitude to be the best person I can be for me, my wife and my kids. I know that I currently do better than most men. But better is never good enough for me. I always want to improve. If not, might as well be dying, right?

No Need For "Toys"

As we evolve our thinking and embrace the simpler life, I am struck by how children are entertained by the simplest of things. True there are a million toys out there and video games and TV, but children ( at least my three) are completely content with tons of fresh air and their own ideas to devise entertainment. This afternoon we hung around the yard until dinner. . . this is a list of the activities I observed them doing:

• Fill a bucket with shells and water
• Fill a bucket with mud and water- dump, refill, poke the mud with a stick
• Find rocks and "build" various things
• Weave sticks together with twine to make a door for a fort
• Cut branches from fort area
• Dig in the dirt
• Fill the wagon with grass to feed the neighbor's horses
• Push a bucket of water in the tire swing
• Move sticks around the yard

These are such simple activities but they all had a purpose to them. There were so many thought processes and discusses going on during these activities, it was amazing. And I have to drag them inside for dinner. 

This is an everyday occurrence.

How to Move- Our version

Getting to a simpler life is not easy. . .

it takes work, it takes commitment. . . 

But it will pay off. 

This was how we went about preparing for the move:

• Create a list of  rooms and put them in the most practical order to be packed and then create a schedule of when to tackle each room.
• Start with Room #1 on the list and then continue with schedule
• Start on one side and work your way around the room- Make a get rid of  bag, trash bag and packing box of stuff you are packing
• Think about how much you really use the stuff as you are making decisions- aim for getting rid of at least 50%.
• Label each box with enough details to remind  you what is in it. If it is hard to label there is probably a bunch of stuff you don't need.
• Make a section in garage for goodwill and dump add bags to each area as they fill up
• I pulled some things I would rather give to friends or family or Freecycle and create a box for these
• After everything is packed except clothes, dishes and a few toys for the kids, go through boxes again and aim to get rid of 30% more.

At this point we are still keeping more than what we need, but aren't using- 30+ boxes AND we still have more than enough to fill our rental home.

When we move and begin to unpack we plan to continue the purging process until we only have what we really need.  It is a PROCESS. It will take multiple passes through our boxes to get down to what we finally keep. Then we will still need to maintenance purge at least twice a year.

Having more stuff than you think you have

Packing up your house and putting it into one area, the moving truck, made us realize just how much stuff we really have (and we took away 2-3 trailers full of stuff). We have removed more stuff than most people do when they move, but still feel like we have further to go. No closets in the new house makes our stuff more apparent...there is nowhere to hide it! Our goal is to reduce the amount of stuff by 25% for our next move. The biggest offenders seem to be clothing, shoes and toys. We are also trying to deal with all the folders/paperwork and accumulated sentimental keepsakes/photos.

First Impressions of the Move

A few of our first impressions of our new home and surrounding countryside:

• Amazing sunset and stargazing on first night here
• Having no closets is hard
• We can survive without a luxury kitchen
• Miss having weather-proofed storage
• Nighttime is more creepy in the middle of nowhere
• Tiny laundry rooms are painful

Moving In A Whirlwind

I want a simple life. . . a simpler life.

This move is part of the bigger picture.

Going through every item we own and deciding where it goes, keep it to use, keep it to pack away, give to a friend, Freecycle it, donate it to  Goodwill,  or just dump it, and then living out of boxes and in what feels like chaos for a couple of weeks is about enough to send me over the edge.

This move has consumed me and my family. I know it happened suddenly, all the pieces lined up and BAM on New Year’s Day we were moving in 13 days. We had been preparing and had some of the leg work of organizing our home done but it has still been an enormous undertaking.

Part of it is the job but the other part is me. I want everything to be “perfect”. I want all my ducks in row with nothing left out.  I also have 3 children and a life, so it is unrealistic. However, we have done a great job and we have been able to let go of some much “stuff”. Our boxes are pretty well organized and moving day tomorrow will be (hopefully) very smooth because of this.

The Beginning

We live in an urban environment and over the past 3 years our thinking has evolved regarding the saturation of consumerism, the use of chemicals in all aspects of our life, the industrialization of our food and many more of the mainstream ways of thinking.

As of 2010 we began trying to remove these negative  influences from our lives;  avoiding the companies who take from the earth without regard or who do not hold standards/values we feel are acceptable for our family, changing our eating habits, researching where we wanted to live and exactly what we wanted to be different in our lives.

 As we started this journey we began to realize how many we needed to make changes we needed and wanted to make. We needed to first fill our life with what really mattered and only then let the other stuff in, but being cautious and mindful of what we allowed.  It forced us to re-evaluate what we wanted from life and all those things that we had been told through the media, upbringing, education, society, etc.  

We slowly began to remove items and not purchase items that were just “stuff” or that did not fit into the value system we had designed for our family . . .

We decided to focus on the core principles that are most important to us . . .This is what makes us happy.

• Reduced Stress Life- An environment that provides a slower pace, a house that meets our needs but is simple, and an outdoor environment that diminishes our stress and makes us feel at peace.
• Family Time- Keeping a healthy balance between work and play, Having family hobbies and activities- boating/wake boarding, running/triathlons, Yoga, 5k’s, reading, homeschooling.
• Relationships with people- Making time for and staying in touch with those people who are important, meeting new people who we have the same mindset as us.

And so began our journey to a Simpler Family Life began.