Voluntary Simplicity

Discovering less is more

I have no plans today. For someone who had been a teacher for 37 years, and retired for four, this continues to be problematic for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my retired life and most days I have plenty to do. My husband and I travel, we do things with our children and grandchildren, I enjoy lunch or tea with friends, I journal, blog, work on my next book or read, I hike and swim. But today I feel like a whiny child…”I’m bored…I have nothing to do.”

It’s hard for me to sit still with no expectations of working on something or planning my next project. I feel a need to fill in every minute. In a pinch I’ll turn on TV or mindlessly scroll through my phone. Is it my personality, the traits I was born with, or the result of having to plan and overplan each moment when I was teaching?

During my morning journaling time , I reached for one of my go-to books, the one with the strange name: Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

I revisited the idea of Voluntary Simplicity. Here are my take-aways:

Voluntary simplicity is doing less so I can do more.

I was the queen of multi-tasking and it’s still in my nature to try to do more than one thing at a time. Am I really present for each moment? If I’m always thinking about the past or planning the future, I’m not fully experiencing the present. As a teacher, I had many, many things to manage. Now that I’m retired my focus has narrowed. I might find that I accomplish fewer things overall, but more of the things that matter most to me. I’ll find my rhythm and won’t feel the need to rush through life. Maybe I’ll learn not to panic when I have “nothing to do.”

Voluntary simplicity is acquiring less so I can have more.

It’s hard to resist the urge to aquire more and more things, new clothes, cars, toys, kitchen gadgets, phones….the list is endless. Besides the obvious cost in dollars, there is a time commitment, storage issues, clutter piles up and I have to clean and organize my growing pile of things. I recently went shopping for a cotton sweater I “had to have” to take on a trip. I spent an entire morning going to several stores, and spent more time online and couldn’t find what I was looking for. Finally, I decided to “shop in my closet” and found a sweater I hadn’t worn in years. It’s not exactly the color I wanted, but I think it will be just fine. In fact, the bright turquoise color might be an even better choice than the cream-color I was searching for. A small, but significant step for me.

Voluntary simplicity is seeing less so I can see more.

Our fast-paced world is constantly bombarding us with images. Earlier this week my husband and I went out to lunch. I was at an outdoor table waiting for him to return from ordering and I automatically pulled out my phone and began checking Facebook and Instagram. While I was looking at images of people online, I missed the real world around me: the mom and her toddler coming out of the children’s museum, the adorable puppy at the next table, the bird trying to fly with a potato chip in its beak. Even on my morning walks, I’m often thinking of future plans, or dwelling on the past. Sometimes I finish my walk and think did I really see the birds or trees or flowers along the way?

Of course, I know living simply isn’t always practical or possible, but I was glad to have this reminder today. I needed it.

“… choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn