Prologue
This is not a book about "going back to the land." It's not a book about going back to anything. We can't go back, even if we want to. We can only start from where we are today. You won't find instructions on homesteading, growing organic tomatoes, or keeping bees in these pages. Nor do I describe a desperate leap from an urban nightmare into a rural paradise. This journal moves back and forth between two major North American cities ( New York and Vancouver ( my two homes for the past decade.
This is a different kind of book on simple living. It's not a how-to manual offering eight or even eighteen steps to a simpler life. Nor does it promise a shortcut for clearing clutter or finding spiritual enlightenment. In fact, it doesn't promise any answers at all. The quest to live more simply is a highly personal one; therefore, I cannot tell you how to reinvent your life on a slower track.
What I can share with you is my own process ( conducted during a year of journal writing ( of trying to understand more and more deeply what is most precious to me, what is worth my time and love and energy. Reflections on my own experience from one day to the next provide the starting point for a year-long meditation on what it might mean to live simply and authentically, close to the bare bones of what matters most in our lives today. That is what this book is about.
The promise that What Matters Most does hold out to you is that living simply does not have to mean moving out to the boondocks to follow Thoreau. Neither does it require you to strip your possessions down to what you can stuff into a suitcase or the trunk of your car, although there are those who prefer to live this way.
Simple living is not simplistic living. We don't have to play at being primitive, or shut down our highly evolved rational left brains and pretend complexity and
fragmentation don't exist in the world, or deny that we may even occasionally find them exciting. We don't have to give our favourite clothes away and live forever after in a homespun sari like Gandhi and Mother Teresa, or in a pair of ratty jeans and a faded sweatshirt. Unless we want to.
The beauty of the search for simplicity is that we start where we are right now. Since I began writing this journal I have discovered time and time again that simple living ( like journal writing itself ( is an open-ended journey. There is no map that tells us how to get from here to there. We create our own path as we go.
Only you can define what living more simply means in your unique life circumstances. For one person, it might mean reevaluating a frantic involvement in too many worthy causes in order to create time for reflection and taking stock. For another, it may mean tuning into the "felt sense" of your life and getting in touch with the sources of fragmentation and conflict that drain you of energy and joy. For someone else, it might involve paying off credit card debt and getting your financial house in order. Yet another person might decide to change careers or sell the family business in order to spend more time with growing children or join the Peace Corps.
My point is that the quest for a simpler life begins with paying attention to the way we live our lives today. It starts with learning to see what is so close that it's invisible most of the time. Living simply demands that we take our habitual day-to-day routines off automatic pilot and look closely and fearlessly at where our lives are heading. And it requires that we discover ( with all the pure singlemindedness of a child at play and the passionate curiousity of a traveller cast on some exotic foreign shore ( where our own treasure lies. When we discover what that treasure is, many other things fall away. Seen for what they are ( mere substitutes for an authentic experience of passion and purpose in life ( they no longer fill a need, no longer clutter our horizons. This leaves us with time and space we have only dreamed of, time for what is essential, time for what matters most.
Over the course of the year, I found myself asking many questions. How does the desire for a simpler life affect my relationships and sense of community? What about my attitude toward material possessions and consumption, career and finances, spirituality and the environment, homemaking and leisure? How can I nourish body and soul, and find time for creative expression? Is it possible to live simply while earning a living? What is the relationship between inner and outer simplicity?
These are, of course, in the first instance, my questions. But perhaps you'll hear echoes of your own here as well.
You'll find many of my favourite quotes about simple living woven into these pages. And, because both children at play and travellers in foreign lands get hungry and delight in good food, I have included some of my favourite recipes for simple cooking. Short on preparation time and expense, they are long on nutrition and eating pleasure. I hope that they will nourish your body and soul along the way.
Introduction
Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world;
it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.
George Sand
When I was a little girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest of Canada, I thought we were rich because my parents gave so much away. One evening twenty-five years later my father casually mentioned that, according to Statistics Canada, our family of five had lived below the national poverty level through all the years of my childhood.
My father's offhand comment left me in shock. What I remember of those early years is the sweet, steady sense of abundance. There was always more than enough food for anyone who arrived at the door unexpectedly, which happened often in the tightly-knit German Baptist immigrant community to which we belonged. My grandmother, daughter of a Russian seamstress and tailor, sewed exquisite two-of-a-kind matching dresses for my younger sister, Nellie, and myself, that made us the envy of our friends. By the time I was eight years old I had a job picking strawberries, raspberries, and stringbeans during the summer holidays. Opening my own bank account with my earnings made me feel grown up and important. Even better, it meant I could indulge my enormous hunger for books and piano music.
During my thirteenth summer I bought a top-model Olympia typewriter with my summer income, proud of my ability to purchase equipment essential to the writer I intended to become. At sixteen I went on a four-week, eight country musical tour of Europe with the local junior high school choir and band. I'd earned the money for the trip myself, washing dishes the summer before in the Empress, Chilliwack's only luxury hotel.
The very idea that the government could have classified us as poor, would have struck me as absurd.
How could we be poor, when the pantry in the brand new house my father had built for us was stocked to the ceiling with every variety of homemade preserve and pickle, in all the rich glowing colours of summer; when the freezer, always filled to maximum capacity, held the side of beef and twenty-five soup chickens we purchased every year from the Schultzes, along with a steady stream of my mother's dark, moist homemade bread, the staple of my childhood diet?
How could we be poor, when the closets and drawers were filled with clothes, linens and kitchenware my parents had bought on sale and stockpiled for future use? When we owned two vehicles, a silvery green Buick, and a dark blue panel truck with "Henry Schiwy Construction" in large white letters on the side? When my parents often filled two grocery carts during our regular Friday night shopping trip, loading up the second for a family in need?
How could we be poor, when we could afford to give so much away?
True, we did not eat in restaurants, buy the latest fashions, or take expensive holidays. But neither did anyone else we knew. We recycled easily and naturally. Leftovers from one meal were incorporated into the next, often tastier than the first. Old clothes were given a second lifespan: adapted for a smaller size, or used in a patchwork quilt. When my father's workshirts were too far gone, they were converted into cleaning rags, the worn, soft flannel far more effective than any Jay-cloth. Accustomed to going hungry during their childhood years in wartime rural Germany, my parents did not take kindly to waste of any kind. If our family could not use something, there was always another that could.
True, the balance in my parents' bank account was never what they would have liked. There were years when my father wasn't sure from where the next mortgage payment would come. And whether it was furniture we needed or a new car, my parents waited until they could pay cash. Rarely, if ever, did we pay full price for anything. We waited until it went on sale, then bought two. Or four. Or a case.
Yet what has stayed with me over the years is that comforting assurance of plenty, with enough to spare. Hardly the memory of someone who'd experienced poverty, regardless of what Statistics Canada had decreed.
Somehow, I managed to live through my university years ( more than a dozen in total ( with that same sense of abundance, even when I must have known there was often barely enough money in my bank account to cover the next month's rent. Young and healthy, filled with energy and optimism, I was thrilled to be at university, only the third member of my extended family to be in that position and the first, as it turned out, to earn a Ph.D. Fortunately for me, it was respectable, almost fashionable, to be a poverty-stricken student during the 1970s, and I was no worse off than anyone else I knew.
Student loans and a variety of scholarships and part-time jobs provided a living of sorts. Rent in Vancouver was affordable then; my sister and I shared a large apartment two blocks from the ocean. Our parents continued to supply us with homemade bread and canned fruits and vegetables from their garden. I created my own and my sister's wardrobes with sewing skills patiently passed on by Oma Schiwy. Campus life at the University of British Columbia and membership in the Vancouver Bach Choir provided social interaction and a musical community. Most of what I really wanted, I managed, somehow, to have.
Then, as many of my friends were rising rapidly in their respective professional fields, I went to Europe and the Middle East, writing in my journal as I travelled, and searching for the meaning of life during the late 1970s when this was still, marginally, a respectable pastime. After six months on the road I flew home from Israel with less than fifty dollars in my pocket. When it became clear that my BA in English Literature was not going to lead me to a rewarding job, I simply went back to university. Not to acquire a marketable degree, however, but because long days of reading and writing punctuated by stimulating two hour cappuccino breaks with other hungry minds seemed, even on a shoestring budget, a far more appealing prospect than working at a boring dead-end job, where I'd be trading my nine-to-five for an income only slightly larger than my graduate fellowship would provide.
In 1983 I went to England on a British Commonwealth Doctoral Fellowship. The rent for my shabby but spacious room at William Goodenough House for Postgraduate Overseas Students in Bloomsbury took more than half of my modest monthly stipend, leaving me with £35, then approximately $50, for my weekly living expenses, including food, clothing, and subway fares. Even as I subsisted on pasta and chick peas, however, the reality of barely making it to the end of the month, once again, did not cast too great a shadow. Life seemed very good.
Willy G., as the residence was affectionately referred to, housed scholars and artists from all over the world, ensuring a readymade social life for those who desired it. With my student ID, I could get into any concert on the South Bank for a few pounds. I was even lucky enough to find a first-rate singing teacher only too happy to exchange voice lessons for reliable childcare.
Despite being poorer than I have ever been before or since, there was a great freedom in living, at thirty, without a mortgage, or car, or any of the other time-consuming accoutréments of adult life. My sole purpose and responsibility were to complete my doctoral dissertation on Christa Wolf, an East German writer whose work I loved. I knew even then it was a charmed life I led, filled with literature and music, friendship and community, and during my final year, love - when I met Steve, now my husband, during his sabbatical at Cambridge University.
Looking back now, it's clear that by the time I'd made it into my thirties with a richly satisfying lifestyle on a marginal income, I knew beyond question that money is not a good barometer of abundance, that there is no meaningful relationship between quality of life and material consumption ( a valuable thing to have known during the infamous "decade of greed."
In 1988, having obtained my doctorate in German Literature at the University of London with little thought of what I would do next, I joined Steve in New York ( with no work visa, no job prospects, no source of income, and no friends. And the exhilarating communal world of graduate student life came to an abrupt end. After a year of deep despondency over my non-status in the academic world, and riding the rollercoaster of a new fulltime relationship, eventually I found several part-time teaching jobs, though scandalously illpaid and exploitative. And I began to consider, at thirty five, what to do with the rest of my life.
Common sense seemed to suggest that, somewhere along the way, I'd get myself a full-time job like other adults, with a proper salary and benefits. It seemed pretty unlikely that this would turn out to be an academic position in New York, since there were hundreds of applicants for every job I sought that first year. But whatever it would turn out to be, I reasoned, once I got that job and established my professional identity, I would be thrust into the real world of student loan payments and mortgages. Meanwhile I was content to teach part-time, conduct journal writing workshops for women, and write. Along the way, my first book, A Voice of Her Own: Women and the Journal Writing Journey, was published, and the dream that had prompted my thirteen-year-old self to purchase that Olympia typewriter was realized at last.
Then, within a year, two well-paid, full-time positions became available. The first was a tenure track teaching post at what turned out to be the best-paid junior college in the country. Nine hundred people applied for a handful of jobs. Twenty were interviewed, myself among them. I did not receive an offer. By all rights, I should have been bitterly disappointed yet, oddly enough, I wasn't. The truth is, I'd never quite convinced myself that I really wanted the position. I would have preferred to receive an offer, to be sure. I might even have accepted it out of delighted gratitude. But deep down, I wasn't so sure that teaching four or five classes of freshman composition each semester was my calling in life. Did I really want a full-time teaching job at a busy junior college, along with endless committee work and the exhausting commute that either Steve or I would be forced to make? Not required after all to make that decision, I settled back contentedly into my poorly paid but satisfying hodge-podge of part-time careers.
The first baby boomers turned fifty in 1996. This was also the year during which, at forty-two, I began seriously to consider the financial exigencies of my future, something that would have bored me to tears in my twenties and thirties. Halfway through my adult working years, it was high time to think about making provisions for the anticipated fifteen to twenty post-retirement years that statistics say I, a healthy North American female with an average life expectancy, should plan for.
As the reality of money began to grow vivid, it suddenly seemed imperative to gain clarity about my financial philosophy and future. This coincided with a long delayed settlement involving the sale of the house from Steve's first marriage, and we had also begun to make plans for relocating to Vancouver at the turn of the century, following Steve's early retirement. Suddenly we were in the midst of number-crunching such as I had never experienced before.
As I immersed myself in pension projections and dollar amounts, I realized with surprise that I was enjoying it. Making plans for our early (if modest) financial independence was exhilarating. I also began to think about the literal and symbolic significance of money ( something we don't really do in this culture ( and to glimpse how deeply our attitudes about its importance in our everyday lives affect every other dimension of our lives. Jungian analyst Helen Luke's brilliant essay, "Money and the Feminine Principle of Relatedness", and Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, provided two very different, complementary perspectives of value. In the process of reading them, I found myself bringing into focus my dearest values and priorities, not least the question of how and where I wanted to invest my life energy.
Then another full-time career opportunity presented itself. I felt I had to take this one seriously since it was so lucrative. It was clear that if I took on a high-profile job with occasional weekend responsibilities, our entire quality of life would change beyond recognition. Up to an alarm at 6:00 AM, I'd be out the door by the time Steve woke up. His late teaching schedule would mean that we'd hardly see each other three days of the week.
Gone would be our leisurely breakfasts of coffee and blueberry corn muffins, discussing our dreams to the insistently joyful strains of Bach's oboe concerti. Gone, the luxurious days of writing and reading, planning workshops and courses. Gone, too, our late afternoon walks on the boardwalk with that endless horizon of ocean stretching out before us. We would need a second car. I'd have to acquire a professional wardrobe. We'd have to eat out or bring in prepared food more often. I would no longer be able to move so freely or frequently between New York and Vancouver, between my east coast and west coast lives. My teaching, writing, and workshops would fall by the wayside as I recast my life to meet the demands of a new career. Our entire life together would have to be reinvented. In essence, as Steve put it, accepting the job would mean a 180 degree change of direction, with an abrupt end to everything I had lovingly tended for half a dozen years and was finally seeing the fruits of. Even my dreams told me I didn't want the job.
And yet. And yet.
I also knew that accepting that position would provide a sense of professional identity I'd never known, and a salary three times what I'd earned to date. And it would give me a pension, something I could no longer afford to shrug off as casually as I did a decade earlier.
I took a full week to think and feel my way through this possibility and, when we were both sure, I turned it down. But I am grateful for the chance to have recognized that, apart from my marginal income and lack of benefits, I already was doing work that held great meaning for me, work that seemed to flow out of my deepest and most authentic being. Why would I give up my work and our cherished, shared daily rhythm for a demanding position that in my heart of hearts I knew I didn't want, just so that five or ten years later I'd be able to quit and come back to what I'm doing now? What guarantee was there that I'd even be around to cash in on this deferred gratification, five years down the line?
During the months that followed I reasoned that, perhaps instead of earning more, I simply had to continue the habits of frugality learned during my childhood and honed over a lifetime of being a student and part-time wage earner. What if I could simply continue to live this life of freedom with my soulmate beside me, both of us content to trade income for time? If abstaining from the baby boomers' infamous love of material luxury could grant us the autonomy we crave, what more could we want?
Above all, what became crystal clear to me was just how precious my time is. More precious than money, security, and a good benefits package. More precious even than prestige or public recognition. In the end, I just couldn't imagine trading the freedom of our life together for greater financial prosperity, which is, quite simply, what it came down to.
Time. Energy. Lifeblood.
All that any of us have, in the end.
And I began to pay more attention to what I did with my time, how I "spent" it, inhabited it, and filled it with meaning. I also began to notice how the people around me "invested" theirs.
For it wasn't simply a job I was saying "yea" or "nay" to. It was a radical shift in my way of dwelling in the world. And the questions that continued to bubble beneath the surface of my calm and resolute "nay" were absolutely fundamental.
What matters most?
How much is enough?
What is my life energy for?
How will I spend my days?
What is essential, and what, superfluous?
And so, I did what I always do when I want to understand something down to its roots and all the way through: I turned to my journal. I began to write down my thoughts, feelings, and questions in order to observe more clearly the sense of purpose shaping my day-to-day living. And to determine how I could bring the necessities of my existence more clearly into the foreground.
"I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life," Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her timeless Gift from the Sea. This journal is my attempt to create synthesis and harmony out of complex alternatives and to discover, more clearly, my own purity of intention. In writing it, I wanted to delve more deeply into the underlying pattern of my days and to determine what they hold. I wanted to explore what simple living might mean for me and perhaps for others in similar life circumstances. More than anything else, I wanted to see - in true and vivid colours - what matters most to me.
