...what I heard this noon when taking a stroll along a park around here. A flock of sparrows had been settling on the tips of one of the big- presently leafless- trees there, twittering their little hearts out at the hint of spring in the air. It was that kind of live, unfiltered experience you´ll never get from any computer program.
Being on a spending fast makes me a lot more conscious of such things than I used to be.
It´s all too easy to reduce one´s life to the hunt for more and more stuff, just paying attention to the next sale or the next item you want to have, or even to the work you have to do in order get the money to purchase the next whatever-it-is.
I have been so guilty of that one. There was a time in my life when whole seasons could pass without my paying attention to nature, apart from changing my wardrobe to match the changing temperatures, and I would have to look at a calendar to tell which season it was.
I spent my time at the office, and when I wasn´t there, I was shopping. When I decided what to do with a day off, it was always just the decision where I would go to shop on that day, or if I should stay home inside instead.. I have been, in that time, living near some spectacular sightseeing places I have never visited. What I knew instead was where to find the best bookstores, or where to shop for shoes or handbags.
Actually, I dreaded those days off because I didn´t know what to do with myself if I neither worked nor shopped. Where I work, I can, if I chose, take thirty days in a year off from work. They call that a holiday. Guess what, for at least ten years I forfeited those days off, preferring to keep working. To me, taking time off work was a sign of weakness. I thought only people who weren´t good and satisfied at their job took time off it, while I should be able to just keep on working at it indefinitely.
You can guess where that mindset took me. One day, my body simply gave out, and instead of taking my days off, I found myself on sick leave for several months in a row. What with medical copays and doctor´s orders to rest, going shopping was suddenly out of the question. Instead, I was more or less confined to a flat chock full of stuff I had dragged home, to the point of being completely cluttered. The only escapes were the regular visits to the doctor´s office, or short forays to the mall for the barest necessities like food and TP.
It was during one of those trips that I did, for the first time since I had moved into that city, hear a bird singing. I stood there, looking up and realizing that I was standing next to an enclosed park with trees, bushes, and flowers, and that the sky was blue, and it was summer. That day marked the point where I started to get better. I wasn´t allowed back to work for awhile yet, but I did make use of the free time I had by starting to tidy up and declutter my flat. As that was a first for me and I was living in a flat twice the size of what I have now, it wasn´t that much stuff that got weeded out at first, but it was a beginning. And it helped me when I finally decided to downsize to the flat I live in today.
The what-to-do-with-a-day-off problem has been hanging on a bit longer. Part of it was that mindset of my Granny´s, who was all her life extremely frugal and a firm believer that it was frivolous to leave the house if one didn´t have something serious to do outside of it, with sightseeing, museum visits, or vacations in general being classified as frivolous pursuits. Shopping, on the other hand, was a legitimate reason to leave the house. So, whenever I felt I had to go out of the house, I went shopping. I never even considered going out in my free time for any other reasons.
When I first fell in love with my now DH, that was actually a sore point between us. He would ask me what I wanted to do on the weekend, and I would say "go to .... and shop for...". DH, now, hates shopping. Even if it´s him who needs something, like a new pair of trousers, or shoes, getting him to shop is a bit like getting him to have a tooth pulled (just kidding, when I am shopping for clothes he´s a paragon of patience :)). Thus, the limited range of my suggestions wasn´t satisfying him at all. He wanted to go sightseeing, visit new places, see historical buildings, in short, to do things that definitely did not involve shopping and did not have, by the standards I had been brought up to, any redeeming value at all. There were some weekends where we almost ended up having a tiff when we were driving to a city and instead of hitting the shopping center of it he´d steer me to the next monument, or church, or castle, while I was all the time seething at being kept from taking at least a teensy look at the shops. Still, slowly, I found myself enjoying those excursions. I found out that I loved to discover new places, that being able to see a gothic cathedral in real life was better than seeing its photograph in a book.
And, after a while, I discovered that those experiences were making me a lot more happy than if I had spent the day shopping.
That discovery, for me, was the start of my personal road to minimalism.
Collecting memories instead of collecting stuff. Doing instead of buying something.
It´s quite sad that I had to learn that first.
But now that I have learnt it, I won´t allow myself to forget it again.
Julia
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