Happy Hermitude

“For the one in hermitude, a simplicity of life and thought begins to unfold.”

See you there!

I’ve been reading lots of other blogs and sites dedicated to simple living, small living, etc. The topics interest me and have inspired me to make some positive changes to my life, but at the moment I simply don’t have the motivation to build my own. Some of us just have to be consumers of the wonderful things that other people create! I’ll continue to post links to articles that I enjoy and find helpful, and talk about why I enjoyed them and how they helped me, but otherwise you’ll mostly find a lot of the inane ramblings of a twenty-something single-professional apartment dweller here.

The beauty of creating a blog is that it has the flexibility to evolve over time, become something else if you want it to, go in a circle and come back to its original purpose. Much like their owners, I suppose. I’m building a simply-cozy kind of life for myself, so I’m keeping the name (and the e-mail address, too!), and hope that my readers continue to enjoy my stories.

Cheers!

I’m learning that I don’t have to have a lot of stuff to be happy – but if there is something I really want, I can usually find it less expensive used or secondhand. This week I picked up a couple extra pieces of seating for my living room on Craigslist for thirty dollars – a pair of wood and leather chairs that have been around longer than I have (they’re quite 70’s vintage), and probably will still be here after I’m gone. They have clean, simple, practical lines, aren’t hugely overstuffed or have springs or small breakable pieces, are easy to care for, durable, and were made in probably one of the last vestiges of U.S. furniture manufacturing before the bigwigs figured out it was cheaper to make everything in China. (Ironically enough, I purchased the chairs from an Asian couple at a moving sale.)

I’m learning that I don’t have to take a lot of stuff with me while I’m out and about. I figured this out a while ago when I was having some pain in my neck and shoulders and found that carrying a heavy purse around certainly was not helping matters. What did I really need when I went out grocery shopping, to the park, whatever? Keys-wallet-phone is my philosophy – so I have a way to get in and out of my house and my car, a way to identify myself (driver’s license) and pay for things (cash and debit card), and a way to stay in touch and reach someone in an emergency if needed. I don’t really need to carry around my checkbook, balance book, digital camera, hairbrush, random papers, makeup and medicine that clutter up my purse (though I still take these things to work, it’s like having a little bit of home in my bag). On occasion, I have gone out for walks taking nothing with me but myself and the clothes on my back. I still feel a little uneasy doing this, mostly because I don’t like to leave my apartment unlocked.

I buy fewer and fewer things on my grocery trips. I avoid the aisles filled with processed foods – I learned somewhere, I forget exactly where, that the freshest and simplest foods are kept along the outer walls of the supermarket, because it is easier to keep them cool there. The inner aisles contained the packaged, preserved and processed foods that will almost never spoil and will therefore last on a shelf forever. I do have a coffee and tea habit that’s just about unbreakable at this point, but for my meals I stick mostly to fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats. I still buy occasional cans of beans and chili – I’m not ALL the way there yet, and as a single girl living alone I still like my convenience food sometimes – but I do look for ones with the fewest ingredients and the lowest sodium content.

I’m simplifying things at work as much as I can. My job mostly consists of answering calls on a helpline for automotive dealerships, which at times can be very busy. I also have a number of projects I work on between calls. The call volumes can be unpredictable, and I have to always be available to answer calls, so I can’t just set aside quiet time for concentrating on projects, as much as I would like to do so. I’ve found I get a bit frustrated when I’m in the middle of a project, and suddenly the phones are flooded with callers. I have learned to take a deep breath, set aside the project, and just focus on answering the phones and doing nothing else until they quiet down a bit. If it’s a project that can wait for a little while, often times I will just wait to do it until the helpline is closed down for the day, or until the weekend, when I can concentrate on it at home.

I see some of my friends and family piling life onto themselves, and I ask myself (and them, sometimes) if they really need to. It’s their choice to heap so much onto their plates, and they can always choose not to do that. Some are taking classes full-time, raising families with small children, working full-time, and sometimes dealing with emotional/mental/physical problems on top of that, either internally or from external sources (i.e., friend drama). I often find myself just wanting to grab them by their shoulders, shake them up a bit, and say “STOP! You don’t need to do this much.” (I also find myself sometimes feeling like a slacker compared to them, since all I do right now is work full-time. No kids, no one else to take care of.) They talk about wanting a vacation to get away from it all, but it’s still going to be there when they return. While a vacation can be refreshing and give you a new perspective on tackling problems, it’s better to just make changes that will reduce the stress in your life for the long term. Take on one thing at a time. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

So in a nutshell, here are a few simple habits that I enjoy and have greatly improved my life:

• Don’t buy so much stuff, and if there’s something you really want or need, see if you can find it used or secondhand, and make sure it will last as long as possible.
• Don’t carry so much stuff around.
• Buy and eat the simplest foods you can.
• Concentrate on one thing at a time, to avoid frustration with trying to multitask.
• Don’t make life unnecessarily complicated. Do less, enjoy more, cut out the drama-mongers in your life if you have to.

Start with just one or two things and work your way up. Then maybe someday we can all be slackers together.

I checked out this Mint.com blog about renting today, and it inspired me to take a little break from posting controversial stuff and talk more about what my blog was intended for

I have been renting, for the most part, for the past ten years (aside from an occasional stay at my folks’ house where I paid no rent). Every now and then I toy with the idea of becoming a homeowner, but my financial situation, even now, does not allow enough room for me to save up for a down payment for a mortgage. My credit card debt has been following me around for the past several years; fortunately I am no longer resolved to the idea that I’m just going to have it forever, and am working on paying it off. (I pay my bills and expenses in cash, and charge nothing to the cards except for reimbursable business travel expenses. The balances tend to go down when that happens – a funny thing, really.) That is my first and foremost priority.

I don’t feel as though I have thrown my money away on rent, especially considering the housing downturn. I think I have “thrown” less money away on rent for the past ten years than many people lost in home equity during the real estate bust. I don’t have to feel like I am stuck in my house that I can’t sell because I owe more on it than what the real estate market says it’s worth. I can pick up and move when I need to, which I’ve had to do an awful lot in the past couple of years, and hope I don’t have to do again for a little while. And when something breaks and needs to be repaired, I can just call maintenance, and they’ll come out and fix it. While I can’t paint and customize as much as I might like to, I make up for that with the use of colorful curtains, rugs and accessories.

Even in the swanky northern Oakland County ‘burbs where I live now, housing prices have dropped enough that I can probably afford one now if I have a down payment. But here’s a funny thing I’ve noticed – smaller houses, ones that are cheaper to heat and cool and maintain – are more difficult to find than the McMansions that were thrown up around here during the housing boom. Scott and I took a drive last weekend through Oakland and Washingtown townships, in the very northern end of Oakland and Macomb counties. Even he, who currently owns a 1,500 square foot, three-bedroom house, was simultaneously amazed and shocked at the sizes of the houses that people keep there. How do they clean them? How do they maintain them? I figured that because the houses were put on postage-stamp-sized plots of land, whatever funds the owners saved in lawn maintenance were used for cleaning services.

What I love most about my small apartment is that everything is within easy reach. The laundry room is just a few steps from my bedroom, instead of in a basement. The kitchen is so small that I only have to turn to reach other cupboards instead of hiking across a vast expanse of tile to find what I need. Most importantly, I use every inch of space that I pay for. I do find myself occasionally longing for more office space, particularly when I am working from home and hunting for a comfortable place to plant and use my work laptop; but that longing quickly fades once I am settled into whatever home office area I decide to set up that day (I keep trying out different arrangements – so far the coffee table has worked the best – once the weather is warmer, I may try out the patio!). Otherwise, I just don’t feel an unquenchable need for more space. The cats might enjoy the extra running room, but what would I do with it all?

Everyone’s needs are different, and a big family might need a big house with a lot of room to run around. I do think that nowadays folks think they need more space than they really do… with a little imagination, even a large family can live comfortably in a smaller space, and still have enough room to not drive each other crazy. Once you have places to eat, sleep and poop covered, sometimes you find you don’t need a whole lot else!

Yes, I am an atheist, and I am no longer afraid to say it. I’m pretty sure I’ve been a nonbeliever, or at least agnostic (not sure one way or the other), for quite some time – I just never really knew of a name that could be attached to it. Until very recently, the word “atheist” carried negative connotations for me, just because that was always how I had been raised and what I had heard on TV and whatnot. I rarely went to church growing up, but I was raised in a Christian household and it was just assumed everyone in my immediate family would pick some form of Christianity to follow once we got older. It was just assumed that we all believed in the Christian god, and I never told anyone that I didn’t. It was more like a “yeah, sure” kind of thing while I was growing up, so as not to make waves or offend any of my friends.

Well, I went in quite the opposite direction. Not for a complete lack of trying to head in the Christianity direction, though. While I was married, I felt I needed some kind of spiritual guidance in my life, and wanted to find a way to get involved in the community as well. I figured church would be the way to go. I asked my then-husband to help me choose a church that we could attend together – he was a little more well-versed in the different branches and I sort of deferred to him to pick a good one for both of us. But he took no interest in the matter, and eventually I stopped pursuing it myself. It was just a lost cause. (As was the entire marriage, but that’s a different post for a different day.) We had been married in a Methodist church, but didn’t attend any services after that.

Surprisingly soon after we split, he reunited with a devoutly Christian girl that he had gone to high school with, and married quickly after. During one of our arguments after we split but were still speaking to each other, he told me how sorry he felt for me and that God loved me. Extremely irritated, I told him not to shove that religion bullshit down my throat, and he ended it at that. And at that point the lightbulb flickered on just a bit – “that religion bullshit” – it made perfect sense. But I immediately dismissed it, because I’d always been raised to believe in God, so how could I not?

A few months later I watched the movie “Religulous”. The lighbulb flickered on and off a lot more.

I moved to Detroit, and after I got settled in, decided to try dating again. I put “non-religious” or “none” in my dating profiles. I coined the term “Reasonably Doubtful” for the religion section of my Facebook profile and thought it rather clever (being completely oblivious to the already-existing podcast by almost the same name, which I have since started listening to). I was ready to not believe unless someone handed me some hard scientific proof otherwise. The lightbulb was on, but still hidden underneath a bushel.

I met my current boyfriend, and he told me right up front he was an atheist. Oh, that horrible word! Whatever must it mean? Out of idle curiosity one day, I looked up the word atheism in the dictionary.

Dictionary.com defines the word atheism as:
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

That’s it. No pictures of Satan worshippers sacrificing pure innocent little Christian babies at the temple, no flames, no fire, no pitchforks, not even the mention of the word “heathen” or anything remotely evil.

That’s all it was. Just the disbelief in the existence of a god.

The lightbulb was so bright then that, at the risk of comparing all this to something even remotely fiery and evil, it burned the bushel away and shone brightly in my little closet of non-believerdom. It was the same lightbulb that came on when I realized what being introverted meant – and most of all, that it was OKAY to be introverted. It’s also OKAY to be an atheist. And I felt so much better after realizing this, like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders… once I realized that not believing in the Christian god, or any god for that matter, was not a bad thing. I’m still here today writing this blog, so it’s obvious no lightning bolts or other maladies have struck me down as a result of this.

In this fantastic free country of ours, I think that freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. Sure, you can believe whatever you want, but you don’t have to believe in anything if you don’t want to. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says “YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IN THE CHRISTIAN GOD AND THAT IS THAT.” And that is a really wonderful thing about the United States, because in other countries, those poor unfortunate souls don’t have a choice. If I’d been born in one of those places, well, I probably wouldn’t have survived.

I’ve since learned that the ubiquitous In God We Trust that we see printed on our money nowadays wasn’t always there. I’ve learned that people like Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein were basically atheists, but lived in a time period where they really couldn’t say as much. Most importantly, I have learned that there are plenty of others out there like me, I have met some of them, and they are some of the nicest, most intelligent folks I have ever met.

To some extent, I am still stuck in my little closet of non-believerdom. On a recent visit to my parents in Texas, my mom tried to convince me to go to church with her, and I told my parents then that I didn’t “believe in that stuff”. I didn’t want to give either of them heart attacks by using any words that would scare them. Our discussion continued the next day – amusingly enough, on Sunday, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant south of Dallas, right smack in the heart of Texas, just after the news of their school board’s decision on their conservative education came out. (The nicely dressed, white, conservative-looking mom-dad-and-two-kids family at the table next to ours kept throwing wary glances our way.) But otherwise I’ve kept my feelings mostly closeted, only bringing them out where I think they really apply, and not in “polite” company.

My doctrine, at this point, is more along the lines of “I don’t believe, but I don’t care if you do”. I wish people would be more willing to think outside the confines of their religious boxes and see that there is a whole world of reason and scientific discovery out there – but I do realize that people often find those confining boxes to be a comfort, kind of like how I prefer the physical confines of living in smaller spaces. I rely on my intuition to discern the fence-sitters from the fundamentalists, and gravitate towards them – if I’m going to convince anybody to see things my way, they will be the ones. I was once there myself.

And there’s your introduction.

My purpose with this blog is to share some of the tips and ideas that have worked for me during my ongoing journey to a simpler life, as well as talk about the trials and tribulations I’ve had along the way. As I continue my journey, I find these get fewer and fewer. I also will discuss how I made the decisions that I have to make various aspects of my life more simple, and answer any questions my readers might have.

For the moment, please feel free to have a look around the rest of the site, check out my introduction/bio pages, and visit some of the other wonderful blogs that I’ve linked to, that have inspired me to get this one started.

Cheers!