When my life up-ended, imploded, exploded, disintegrated, shattered, dissolved, basically fell apart, I did not know what to do next. I thought I did. I was wrong. I spent quite a long time trying to do what I thought I wanted to do, before I finally started listening to myself.
What I really wanted was to live a simple life. A slow life. A creative life.
To begin with, I didn’t know that. I thought I still wanted a variation on the life I had been living. Busy. Business-y. Successful, based on the wrong definition of success, or perhaps more accurately, an outlived definition of success. Not wrong, just no longer valid.
I’d worked hard to get where I was and hadn’t yet worked out that what I was standing on wasn’t a ladder – it was a bridge. I hadn’t yet understood that now it wasn’t about climbing higher; it was about moving across a chasm onto a different plane.
Eventually, I got the idea. And time moved on. And so did my life.
Only, I didn’t notice that happening. Sometimes the shifts we ask for happen so slowly that we don’t notice them. I kept saying that I wanted to live a simple life. I kept trying to figure out how to do that.
Then one day, quite recently, I got a message from a friend, in which she gave me the update about someone else’s life and suddenly I realised. Yes, I want to live a simple life. I just hadn’t appreciated that I am already doing so.
They say that to make sure we get what we want we have to start by knowing exactly what that is. Easier said than done, but also it can sometimes be even harder to figure out that you’ve already got it.
Living the dream has become such a clichéd expression, that we have bought into the idea that there is only one dream. There isn’t. There are billions of dreams. We each have our own, and just to make it a little bit more tricky: our own personal dream might be a shape-shifter. Maybe the life I have now is not the one I dreamed of when I was 15, or 27, or 43.
Actually, no ‘maybe’ about it. It definitely is not.
But it is the one I want now. It is not perfect. There are gaps, omissions, losses, unachieved things, but there are no regrets and growth is ongoing. I reject the word ‘perfect’ but I choose the word ‘ideal’. The sign in my hallway that reads My ideal life is now my reality, rings true because for me that ideal life needs those gaps and niggles and opportunities for growth. Who knows, maybe it even needs those occasional plummets into the deep dark well, though I’d wish it didn’t. I could live without those, but I suspect they also serve their purpose.
The indisputable aspect is that my ideal life is simple. And so is this one that I now have.
So, when it comes down to it, exactly what is a simple life?
I’m sure you have an answer to that question. You can tell me what it includes and what it excludes, but that is your definition and given how many of us there are in the world, the odds are that it does not align with mine.
You might think (and I won’t disagree with you) that a simple life is one lived purely off the land, off-grid, thriving on the back of your own hard labour and whatever minimal trade you need in order to get the absolute essentials you can’t get any other way.
I won’t disagree with you, because that is one kind of simple.
From my personal perspective though, that is also one kind of complicated.
That kind of life needs a raft of knowledge and skills and physical energy that I simply do not have. It needs a certain amount of land, which maybe I do have (to be fair). It needs me to go out and learn so much that I probably no longer have the time in which to learn it, given that I am of a certain age.
But there is more to it than that. If I were to go down that route, the time I would need to devote to learning and experimenting and (let’s be honest) actually working – hard hand-to-the-land working – would have to be culled, stolen, pulled out of the time I currently spend doing other things.
And I like doing those other things. More than that: those other things are what feed my soul. They are my callings, living off the land is not. There are times when I wish it were. There are times when I wish I could do all the things that would make it feasible. But I am called to look for beauty, share wisdom (when I find it), put the pen to the page…and that too takes time. And effort. And energy.
It follows, then, that to go down the off-grid, nature-close route would not simplify my life; it would complicate it. It would add stuff without removing stuff – or it would need me to remove stuff I want to keep – it would be stressful.
I’m not up for that.
Not now that I’ve worked out that I already have the simple life I asked for. My kind of simple.
My kind of simple involves oh, you know, doing what I do…walking, writing, swimming (in the sea when I can manage it, in the pool when not)…reading a bit… taking a few pictures… tai chi…a bit of ropeflow…cooking…tending my home and my garden…meeting my friends.
That’s about it. No drama. Nothing to see here.
I should probably add that getting here took some effort, and some luck, and some ageing, and some help. I’m not here to say: do this! Because doing this took a lot of things falling into place to enable me, empower me, to make the choice to live a quiet, simple, undramatic life. I could not have done this when I was younger. I did not have the resources I do now; more importantly I don’t think I believed in myself enough.
Even now, knowing I absolutely have the life I want, I find it hard in the social context. Not a lot doesn’t seem like an adequate answer when people ask what you’ve been up to – but what else do I say, when really they don’t want the minutiae of what I’m writing or reading or what I found beautiful yesterday? They want my latest drama – or my latest funny story – and I tend to have neither to offer. Simple, gentle living is a wonderful thing to experience, but it doesn’t make for good stories.
I’m sure there is more ‘simplifying’ to be done. More stuff to discard or donate. More mind-clutter to remove. An easier way to flow through my litany of choices. Work-in-progress.
Life is always a work-in-progress. Even a simple one.
