Peter Lawrence's lifestyle is very different from that of the average American. He doesn't own a bed... instead he sleeps on the floor in a sleeping bag. He doesn't own a television, a sofa, a dining room table, or most of the other pieces of furniture usually found in a home. His computer desk is an old adjustable ironing board that was left behind by its previous owner. He says that if he had to move house quickly, he could pack all of his belongings into his 1999 Honda Civic and be on the road in about an hour.
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This little book started life as a leather covered textbook that was written by a man named Walter S. Cox. He led an interesting life... he was one of several lawyers who defended the group of people who were accused of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. 
After he became a judge and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, he presided over the trial of the man who assassinated President James Garfield. Later he became a professor in the Law Department of Columbia University and the first Dean of Columbia Law School. He wrote this book, called Questions for the Use of Students in the Junior Law Class of Columbia University, which served as a textbook for law students. Versions of this book came out every few years. This one is dated 1881. It is set up like a study guide, with a summary of various legal principles, including questions and blank pages for the law student's answers and notes. My law student was very diligent. This book is packed full of his responses and essays written in the most beautiful handwriting... it's all very neat, very legible, and in the very distinctive writing style of that time period.
I almost didn't even look through this one... after all, I'm not a law student and I don't really need an 1881 study guide for the junior law class of Columbia University. But apparently this particular law student finished the course with blank pages still left in his textbook, and someone else decided to use these pages for a journal.
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It was a strange summer. This was the year when New England gardeners learned that no amount of expertise or hard work could overcome the weeks of constant rain and too cool temperatures that began in early June and continued on until the end of August.
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Readers often tell me that they would like to be more frugal but that they don't want a lifestyle of "living poor" and "doing without." What they don't realize is that there IS another way. Actually, I have serious objections to much of the frugal advice out there because it offers only quick-fix extreme measures that... like a crash diet... can't be lived with for very long. Extreme frugality sets up feelings of deprivation that almost always lead to bouts of spending... the money that you gave up so much to save gets spent impulsively and you're back to square one. To me, that yo-yo cycle of deprivation/splurging, deprivation/splurging is playing at frugality, not living it. Oddly, finding a level of frugality you CAN live with for the rest of your life is much, much easier.
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I keep a well-stocked pantry and an accurate ongoing pantry inventory. A small notebook hanging out of sight on the inside door of a pantry cabinet allows me to quickly update the list as inventory is added or used. This inventory list allows me to see at a glance exactly what is in the pantry and how much there is of each item.
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"I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air."
--Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The centerpiece of my kitchen is our wood-burning cook stove. It's a big stove, standing over five feet high and almost three and a half feet wide. It has an oven, a warming oven, a solid copper water reservoir with a tap, and a large cook top surface with six lids. We keep a fire burning in this stove non-stop through all the winter months, and it provides enough heat to keep one entire floor of our house warm and cozy despite our extremely cold outdoor temperatures.
We bought this stove several years ago from an area merchant. We loaded it into our small truck to bring it home ourselves, and with the help of a mover's dolly, my husband and I got the stove into our house. Now, looking back, I wonder how we were able to manage the weight. Perhaps it helped that we had not read the instruction manual's warning that the stove was very heavy and at least four men would be required to move it!
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The easiest way to start is to learn to cook on top of the stove. You have probably already discovered that different areas of the stove top are hotter or less hot than other areas. Finding the right cooking temperature is simply a matter of "knowing" your particular stove. Obviously the stove top will be extremely hot just over the firebox, but if the stove has heat channels that circulate the heat to the oven and reservoir, there will often be very hot spots in other areas of the stove top as well. In our stove the hottest area is always slightly to the right of the firebox. This is where I put pans for a quick boil or anything that requires really high heat. If a lower or more moderate temperature is needed, or as the food cooks, I move the pans to different areas of heat on the stove top.
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Have you ever noticed how many of the same people who are trying to promote a simple lifestyle make frugality into a negative concept... or how they routinely equate frugality with being cheap or miserly? Somehow frugality has become almost synonymous with deprivation and denial, and understandably, this kind of negative frugality turns most people off. It turns me off too...
The good news is that true frugality isn't like that. When frugality is based on your own values and what YOU want out of life, it can only be a positive influence. It's also important to remember that true frugality isn't just about spending less money... how you choose to spend your time and how you choose to conserve other resources should all be a part of the total equation.
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Voluntary simplicity is a philosophy. Often called compassionate living, it is a conscious choice to simplify your life and a deliberate downshifting to create the life and home environment that fit you and your family.
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Ten years ago my husband and I were spending most of our time at work running a business we had created. Financially everything was great... the store we owned and operated was in a wonderful location, it was a spacious, attractive and newly renovated space, and the extra large office meant that our children could always be there with us. To all of us our store was like a home away from home, and the only down side was that we were spending so much time there that we never had any time or energy left for our real home or the other things we felt were more important. As the years went by, we began to realize that we never were going to have that time as long as we had the store. Still, letting go of the store was almost unthinkable because we had worked so hard to get to where we were.
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On our wedding day, my husband and I were both just out of school. Neither of us had any savings or anything of any value to bring to our marriage, but I don't remember ever worrying about finances then. My husband had just started a new job and we had rented a small furnished cottage. We had student loans to pay off, and a car payment to make. We bought a bookcase and a sofa bed and signed up for monthly payments on them. We managed to save a small amount each month and we never accumulated a large amount of debt, but still almost every cent of every paycheck had a place to go even before the check was cashed.
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Although living simply is second nature to us, we do not live a spartan lifestyle. Neatness and order are very important to me and I do declutter and organize on a regular basis, but I am not a fan of extreme purging, and I do not like the minimalist look. We have many family antiques and a few collections and other "things" scattered throughout the house, and I believe these homey touches add character to a room. We also have books... and more books. We are all voracious readers and over the years we have gathered together a large library of books that we go back to again and again. I do not believe that purging any of these items from my life would make me a freer or happier person... quite the contrary, in fact. But that's me (us).
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Many of you have asked how our lifestyle has been shaped by the core ideas of frugality and voluntary simplicity. Actually, we had been living that type of lifestyle for years before either concept became popular. Frugality comes naturally to native New Englanders, I think, and most of us already have a strong streak of individuality and an inclination to do things just a little bit differently than the rest of the world. We have always practiced some degree of frugality, always believed in "living green" and conserving. The voluntary simplicity part came later, nearly ten years ago now... but that's another story!
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One of the biggest ways we have saved money through the years is to do things ourselves. Any time we can make, repair, or do something ourselves, instead of paying someone else to do it for us, we can save big. Our most recent project, for example, was installing hardwood floors in all of the bedrooms in our house. Somehow that project escalated to include repainting the walls and the ceilings, and of course since we've done all the work ourselves, it has taken a longer time than if we had hired someone. But because we saved so much money on the installation we were able to choose a much higher quality of hardwood than if the installation had to be included in the cost. Like all of our projects, installing these hardwood floors was a learning experience. Before we began, we studied all the information and how-to's we could find on the subject, and then we just jumped in. We "practiced" until we were happy with our results, and then we did our first floor. Now that we have so many great looking finished floors behind us, we're already thinking about a possible next project.
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Downshifting means working towards simple living by making conscious choices to leave materialism behind and move on to more sustainable living. It does not mean simply cutting back and trying to live the same life only with less money. Downshifting requires prioritizing, an adjustment in values, and a totally different mindset... not just a change to a more frugal way of living.
People decide to downshift for a variety of reasons. Many want to get away from "living competitively"... job stress, consumerism, and feeling they have to live up to someone else's expectations. Other people downshift because of a life changing experience, health reasons, or a crisis in the family. Often downshifting comes out of a wish to conserve natural resources. Whatever the reason, downshifting isn't limited to any age or income level.
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Everybody wants to be happy, but many people don't realize that happiness has to come from within. If you're not content with your life and at peace with yourself, no amount of money or possessions will make you truly happy. True happiness comes from learning to enjoy the life you are living now and learning to appreciate the things you have at this moment. Living for a future time and yearning for the things you don't have will never make you happy.
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So what does simplifying really mean? Personally, I don't think it means to empty your life down to the barest minimums just for the sake of the purge. To me, simplifying means eliminating anything that is a drain on your time, energy and soul while giving nothing back in the way of enjoyment, contentment or peace. Use this idea as your guide when deciding what things (if any) should be purged. It helps to remember that simplification, like frugality, is a tool as well as a goal. The ultimate aim is not to just make your life simple, the goal is to make your life balanced, happy and fulfilled.
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One of the first things most people discover when they try to live a frugal lifestyle is that extreme frugality is almost impossible to live with long term. It's a lot like dieting. You can cut back on what you eat in a sensible way that you can live with happily for the rest of your life, or you can go on an unhealthy starvation diet that will make you miserable and is impossible to maintain. Some people try to save money by cutting so much out of their life that they end up feeling very deprived... the reason, I think, why some people get so burned out... they try too hard and deny themselves too much... almost guaranteeing that they will end up feeling impoverished and very dissatisfied with their new lifestyle.
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We had been living a simple life for many years before I discovered there was a name... voluntary simplicity... for the way we have chosen to live. Obviously, our version of voluntary simplicity... living debt-free, living close to nature, working from home, living green and without chemicals, cooking from scratch... is based on OUR personal choices, so I wouldn't expect it to be exactly like anyone else's version of the lifestyle.
However... earlier this week I was disappointed to see the voluntary simplicity movement described by one author as "learning to live poor." Equally disappointing was another author's insistence that anyone wanting to live simply must completely stop spending on wants and limit spending only to needs. Combine this with the focus on extreme purging and eliminating everything except necessities, and simple living sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? I know I wouldn't want to live that restrictive a lifestyle!
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