A Stack of Washcloths from Leftover Yarn

At the moment I’m sitting at the table in front of the patio doors that lead out to the deck of a house in the Indiana Dunes. The view is woodsy, trees just leafing out, mostly oaks, maples and cottonwoods. It’s very different than the view from the big window at home, which looks across the street at a massive plain brick wall, the swimming pool side of a former YMCA. It’s a bit of deja vu for me, as I’d once lived in these dunes for fifteen years. It’s also very different than the spring I’d originally envisioned, which was working and puttering under a shady arbor in my garden, and getting to know and play with a grandchild. I’m still getting my sea legs with the current reality, so that I can make the most of it.

The novel proceeds apace, and the first quarter is currently in the hands of my Reader Team. There are similarities between learning to write a novel and learning to knit well: the choices, the options, are vast, for one thing (pattern/plot, yarn/protagonist, color/style), and it takes a lot of practice to do it well, to get a flow going, and to have consistency in the gauge. Many writers say you have to write a million words before you get any good at it, and I think the same might be true of knitting (or crocheting or other needlework), although the speed at which my daughter-in-law went from knowing nothing to producing stunning sweaters could not possibly have added up to ten thousand stitches, let alone a million.

While working on the novel, I moved from hacking together a plot line and some characters to refining them, and became aware of elements such as dramatic tension and telling versus showing. My protagonist has become less and less like myself, taking on a life and attitude of her own, which means that when I now sit down to write, I must enter into her point of view, get inside her head. The other characters have become more real, as well, and the plot has shifted because the more they become distinct personalities, the more their motivations become clear, the way their threads of the story want to play out. I find myself no longer working to a formula, which is thrilling and scary at the the same time. Riskier, too.

Risk is relative. I will turn 58 this summer. It’s not old, but it’s not young. I’ve written my million words and knitted my million stitches, so even doing something new is not as new as it would have been thirty years ago, or not new in the same way. Some of the baby steps in learning something new can be skipped, while others can be real hurdles. But time itself becomes a more pressing factor. Over the winter, we were near as a close friend gradually faded out from a brain tumor, an inescapable reminder that time can run out before finishing the normal course of steps toward a goal. And the likelihood increases with time.

Time, too, increases the number of loose ends, incomplete story lines, unresolved plots. “You can’t go home again” becomes an echo that doesn’t end. “What happens next?” becomes an unanswered question. I used to have a bad habit of not doing the tedious finishing work with projects, the blocking and the weaving in of the loose ends; it didn’t matter back then, there was plenty of time to do it later. These days, however, it brings great satisfaction. Actually seeing something to completion, dotting the last “i,” crossing the last “t,” weaving in the last loose threads, finishing Act I, then Act II, and finally the entire story with Act III–it’s a gift, really.

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It’s Time to Do It.

There are as many variations on minimalism as there are minimalists, and that number seems to be increasing, hopefully faster than the number of useless items in our respective junk drawers. Far from dead, minimalism appears to be seeping into the mainstream. Earlier this month, The New York Times featured an article by Treehugger.com’s Graham Hill, entitled “Living With Less. A Lot Less,” which is an account of how he became a minimalist, and the high-end way in which he lives it. In turn, it triggered a recent post by Katy Waldman on Slate.com, “Is Minimalism Really Sustainable?” which expressed the feelings of many that minimalism itself may be okay, but Graham Hill’s version was just a variation on conspicuous consumerism. The Hill article also inspired Dana Feldman of BreakThruRadio.com to remind us of Barry Schwartz’s TED talk ‘way back in 2005 on Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, and the relationship between minimalism, pessimism, and the delight in things that comes of lowered expectations (and many thanks to Dana for mentioning this blog).

The Hill article generated many impassioned comments, and I was struck by the number of people who did not understand the most fundamental element of minimalism: it’s a choice. Minimalists choose minimal consumption, possession, footprint, waste, and stress. Their motivations include ethics, green living, finances, pessimism, optimism, aesthetics, being married to a minimalist, boredom, creativity, disgust at consumer gluttony and waste, or any combination of these. You could probably add to the list.

There was also a lack of understanding that minimalism is relative. For instance, those who live in rural areas, such as on farms, are fully justified in minimalist terms if they have barns full of old tractor parts and lumber and whatnot. They are recycling, plus saving a lot of time, energy, and fuel by having on hand what would otherwise be costly to replace anew. The same goes for families and other collectives. What one needs is relative. A homeowner will need more than an apartment dweller, a single person will need less than a family, a younger person will not need the creature comforts of an older one. An office worker will likely need more clothes than a home-based worker, and certain professions require uniforms. None of these issues of what and how much are the right things to focus on.

The real issue is why you have what you have, and is it really adding anything to your life? Is it really saving you time in spite of caring for it and storing it? Does it still mean as much to you as it did in the past? If it wasn’t around, would you miss it or would you appreciate the added space, time, and lack of clutter? What you have and how much of it you have will vary from person to person.
Choosing minimalism is also a great way to get past fears of not having enough of anything. Courtney Carver calls it “embracing fear,” getting past the self-consciousness, the worry that people will think you are crazy for getting rid of stuff or not going on shopping sprees. Once it’s done, the fears don’t seem so large anymore. It’s liberating. If you don’t buy and keep so much stuff you don’t really need, you’re much more likely to not run out of money, run out of space, run out of time.

Where does the fear of not-having come from? One answer would be our culture of consumerism, the way any natural tendency to accumulate is stressed to the point of neurosis, a neurosis which has long since been rendered socially acceptable. Everywhere we turn, advertising tells us that he/she who has the most bling wins, whether the bling is diamonds or power tools. Those who grew up under the frugal influence of the Great Depression or in circumstances of deprivation often have a heightened need to keep everything “just in case,” no matter how unlikely the need will come about. It’s an attitude that has often been passed down through generations. Those who have managed to break free of the mindset when it is no longer needed experience a tremendous sense of freedom.

Most minimalists are not millionaires like Graham Hill, who have sold an Internet business and can afford to buy aesthetic minimalism, which has always been expensive. Most of us are run-of-the-mill folks who simply came to the realization that consumerism is fundamentally unsatisfying. We’re tired of running out of space for the things we’ve accumulated, tired of spending every dime we’ve earned at tiresome jobs for these things, tired of trying to find what we need amid the piles of what we don’t, tired of trying to take care of things we don’t really need and use, tired of the sense of being owned by our stuff and not the other way around, tired of the time lost in shopping and the stress of making a choice among too many choices, tired of keeping up with the tiresome Joneses, tired of reining in our families’ expectations, and tired of the sheer wastefulness of consumerism, of its impact on our environment and our health.

Minimalists come from all socioeconomic strata, not just the privileged. We shop anywhere from Target to Neiman-Marcus, drive 20-year-old Fords and next year’s Audis, wear $500 jeans and $2.50 ones from the 50% off Saturday Sale at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It doesn’t matter how much the stuff cost, or even what quality it is: too much stuff is too much stuff. The handyman homeowner is going to have more stuff than his brother the Internet entrepreneurial millionaire who can afford to hire someone else to do the repairs, and more stuff than his other brother the nomadic couch-surfer who lives out of a backpack,  but it doesn’t mean he has less potential to be a minimalist. But the millionaire who doesn’t use a garage full of power tools because he hires everything done is not a minimalist, and the nomad who borrows without giving back and imposes his way through life isn’t a minimalist but a moocher.

Minimalism for minimalism’s sake is just as much of a trap as blind consumerism. There can be a neurotic, compulsive sloughing off of possessions just as there can be compulsive hand-washing, or certain kinds of masochism. There is also reverse consumerism, an obsession with counting the number of possessions and not allowing them to go over that number. All of these are stress responses, too, just as compulsive shopping and hoarding are. Annie Brewer lays out the dangers of this in her post, “The Slavery of Extreme Minimalism,” warning of losing friendships by being a moocher, and of and impoverishing yourself if you refuse to own the basic things needed to sustain yourself.

It can be argued that minimalism is strictly a luxury for those who have enough. But there are degrees of enough. There are those who have nothing–the truly poor, the homeless, the dispossessed. Their enforced lifestyle is not minimalism, because, with very few exceptions, there was no choice. This leads to something which really ticks me off: people who sneer at minimalism, saying it is an insult to the poor. The comparison is contemptuous and should simply never be made. One is a choice, the other is not.

The choice of minimalism should be celebrated, when the “haves” don’t take up more of the world’s resources than they truly need–and maybe even use some of their own resources for the betterment of the “have-less.”

This post was originally posted under the title, “The Choice of Minimalism,” on March 31st, and reposted under the current title due to a glitch in the feed and email notification service. Apologies to anyone who received a duplicate.  M.

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Setting Down the Pen for a Moment

This does not mean I haven’t been writing. In fact, I’ve been writing more in the past month than I usually do, just plugging away at my novel, and continuing to learn the craft. Writing a novel is very, very different than writing a blog post, a nonfiction book, or even a short story. There are so many different elements and so many different approaches, and so many decisions to make. The ability to see many possibilities is a desirable trait in any kind of creative endeavor; so, too, is the ability to make decisions. The two traits, however, are often in conflict.

Should my heroine be in the throes of a personal disaster at the start of the novel, or should she be past it and yet a little scarred? Should the small town be landlocked or in a waterfront resort? Should the old lady be killed off or should she live another twenty years? Sometimes I think I’ve made my decision, write several chapters based on that decision, and then suddenly run into some sort of problem that a different decision could have avoided. Sound like real life, doesn’t it?

Yet if I don’t make a decision, the story doesn’t move forward. And that’s what we novel-readers want, isn’t it, for the story to move forward? Even if all that happens is a bit of personal growth, it’s a step forward for both the main character and the reader’s experience. Our own lives only move on as a result of decisions and choices.

Thus, while immersed in trying to make decisions that move my novel forward, the sense of suspended animation increased in the rest of my life. It was time to take a look around and reconnect. We’ve begun to put some plans in place, to change things up a bit on the home front and spend more time in the company of good friends during the warmer months. Fortunately, I’ve been dieting since the holidays ended, and have managed to fit back into my basic blank tank bathing suit, which I’d purchased seven years ago but never wore. There are supposed to be plentiful opportunities to wear it this summer. (And also fortunately my friends have aged just as much as I have, and my flabby arms will be in good company.)

The writing, however, will continue throughout. At this point, I predict the novel will be finished before summer, some good six months later than I’d originally planned. On the bright side, I’ve been taking my time to learn the craft as thoroughly as I can, and laying the groundwork for the novels that will come later;  those will hopefully not take quite as long to hammer out. When I’m ready I will post a chapter or two or at least share in the details. It’s getting closer and closer to being finished, and I’m writing the last part of the story now. Never thought I’d see the day that I could say that I’m finishing a novel.

So I guess my own story has been moving along, after all

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No, Your Eminence!

Respect for authority is not the same as blind obedience. Consciousness of an hierarchy, a structured order, is a useful way to keep a society running smoothly and for the greater good. But both parties, the leader and the led, are expected to assume the other role as needed. In situations where the leader is seen as infallible, however, delusion is in play–and where there is delusion, there is often abuse in some form or other.

The abdication of one’s authority and power is not always a conscious one, particularly if you’ve been brought up in an environment where someone holds total authority. You are conditioned to place your total trust in that authority figure, and any attempt to question or challenge that authority is quickly and thoroughly knocked down, ridiculed, or somehow censored. If others around you are blindly obedient, or even grudgingly obedient, there is no example of how to respectfully disagree. Learning to think for yourself is fraught with risk, because some form of excommunication, of the nuclear option, is always an explicit or underlying threat: abandon total obedience, and you in turn will be totally abandoned. Social animals that we are, it can be difficult to risk abandonment, which in turn gives authority yet another tool to control us.

Sentimentality plays on fears of abandonment, as well. “Specialness” is assigned to certain gifts and tokens to indicate the ties that bind us to others. We are encouraged to give them, to receive them, and to keep them, as if the objects are as precious as the relationship itself. Many of us have avoided tossing out old birthday, Valentine’s, and Christmas cards, as well as other gifts and mementos, because doing so would suggest we’re tossing out the relationship, as well. Such items are said to be kept “for the memories,” but the deeper truth is that they are kept as emotional crutches. Likewise, we are afraid of asserting our preferences over the preferences others assign to us, as in the form of gifts and items handed down in the family, so we hang on to those white elephants forever, no matter how useless or unappealing they may be.

I think that people raised in an authoritarian environment are vulnerable to other forms of voiced authority, such as marketers, because they are conditioned to not question what is being said. They are also vulnerable to inordinate belief in heroes (romantic and otherwise), because of the early learned rewards of looking up to someone without question, to idolize. The flip side is not thinking of ourselves as good, as important, as worthy as those in authority or who are held in similarly high esteem. Not going along with with what’s being asserted or having someone to idealize easily leads to feelings of alienation, and can in practice lead to some form of actual abandonment when there’s an entire group buying into the message or the idol.

A sense of security derived from obeisance to authority, then, can only be had within the embrace of authority figures, making it incredibly difficult to find a way out of this behavioral pattern and provide your own sense of security. But it can be done.

One of the unexpected benefits of going minimalist was the sense of personal freedom that grew from detaching myself from the need to own and keep everything, and from breaking up with the implied significance of material things. When I stopped recreational shopping and exposing myself to the bait of magazine spreads and other forms of product lure, I woke up to the impact of advertising. When I divested myself of half a lifetime’s worth of things that were saved but unused, I restored the balance between the worth of my life in the here and now and the worth of my past, thus increasing my sense of security. When I moved from tentative decluttering of a closet to getting rid of huge amounts of unneeded things, my sense of personal authority grew–I was determining what was important, how I wanted to live, and every other element of my life and identity.

Clarity moved in when clutter moved out. By increasing my relative sense of worth to myself, the value of my time and energy skyrocketed. Things I worked hard at really had to give something back, or they weren’t worth doing. I stopped forcing myself to bend to others’ wills just to make nice. I started saying “No!” when I had serious objections or wanted to protect my time and energy.

Perhaps the result can be reduced to a formula: Lose the Crap = Don’t Take the Crap.

Of course, not everyone who takes a minimalist path will either experience or even need to experience this kind of empowerment. Much depends upon the root of the original accumulating behavior. But nearly any kind of compulsive behavior is a symptom of anxiety, and the anxiety in turn stems from insecurity on some fundamental level. I’m willing to bet that unchallenged authority plays a role in creating insecurity and undefined anxiety for a large number of us. And in a capitalist culture like ours it’s easy to channel anxiety into accumulating and even hoarding.

Could it be that opting out of group-think of any kind would enable us to be better watchdogs over society as a whole? If you look at one part of your world with your eyes open, wouldn’t it extend to looking at the rest of it the same way? Would we see our leaders and our heroes and our trend-setters and our voices of authority with interest and respect–but only as long as they earn it? Looking askance at authority figures means asking yourself, “What’s in it for them?” and “What’s really in it for me?” It means not being like little children and letting leaders get away with abusing their power because we’ve always automatically done what they tell us to do.

Aren’t we, as individuals, worth more than that?

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Chocolate Chips

It’s a good time to snuggle in and do a lot of reading, letting the author do my thinking for me, which of course means not reading anything too demanding. It means watching programs on t.v. It means idiot-level knitting (washcloths made from left over cotton/linen blend), comfort food (anything with noodles), sufficient amounts of chocolate, and ibuprofen and vitamin C. Warmth and fuzzy socks. An occasional nip of brandy. As much sleep as can be had between bouts of weirdly vivid dreams.

When I’m like this, I shy away from essay writing, and you should be glad. But I can still share some of the things I’ve been enjoying or finding useful lately, at least in the form of links. This list is by no means definitive or exclusive, it’s what comes off the top of my head as I’m in front of the computer at this moment in time (the Amazon links are affiliate):

Mystery Authors–I read their series from beginning to end:

C. S. Harris: Her Sebastain St. Cyr series takes place in the Regency era, and is replete with the dashing hero, the feisty heroine, and nefarious plots to bring down the government or ruin a family’s fortune and reputation, all better-written than most of this sort. What Angels Fear is the first book in the series.

Katherine Hall Page: Her Faith Fairchild series practically defines the contemporary cozy mystery genre. The novels begin from about 1990 to the present, and take place in a fictional historic small town not far from Boston. Faith is the wife of a local minister, but not in the least sanctimonious. She is also a caterer, so there are recipes and often food-related plots. Start with The Body in the Belfry.

Tasha Alexander: Her Lady Emily series takes place in the 1880′s-90′s, and the heroine challenges nearly every convention of the Victorian era. Most of the stories are based in London, but a few take place abroad, beginning with And Only to Deceive.

Writing-related stuff:

The Passive Voice: a sort of digest/blog covering aspects of writing and publishing. The Passive Guy is a lawyer, but doesn’t get into legal advice on this blog. Instead, he simply presents excerpts from publishing-related news items, or poses questions, or provides differing points of views, sometimes with his own take on things. He posts quite frequently. This is a great resource for writing/publishing food for thought.

Advice to Writers: Jon Winokur puts up a writer “quote of the day,” usually quite brief, and nearly always hitting the mark for me.  I find the selection of quotes to be more attitude-adjusting than inspiring, which suits me to a T.

iPod Games–which are available in free or cheap versions:

Words With Friends: everybody does it.

Scrabble: better than Words With Friends.

Bingo Rush: weirdly addictive.

Catapult King: hilarious graphics and sound effects.

Calorie Counter:

My Fitness Pal: the most amazing calorie calculator I’ve ever seen or used–it’s got a huge database, AND you can enter your own recipes. Not only calculates calories, but carbs, protein, fat, water intake, and both strength and cardio exercise. I use the desktop version, but there is also an iPod app. I thought I was pretty good at keeping mealtime calories within reason, but got some real eye-opening results when I entered my recipes. Can’t say enough good about this one.

Cookbook app:

Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and his other volumes are now available for iPhone/Pod/Pad. It is one beautiful app, very smooth to use. I like to kick around through it almost as much as playing a game, just to read about food.

Music:

Beethoven Piano Sonatas: Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) interpreted Beethoven like no one else, bringing out the lyrical lines rather than just going all sturm und drang like most performers. I’ve been enjoying MP3 recordings of his Waldstein Sonata (No. 21 in C Major, Opus 53), and of the final Beethoven Sonata, No. 32 in C Minor, Opus 111, which I had the good fortune to hear Kempff himself perform in London in 1980. It was sublime.

Catch up with you next week

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