Clutter in Life

[kmaherali]

The Serenity of Simple Pleasures

Life is really simple,
but we insist on making it complicated.
- Confucius

If thou wilt make a man happy,
add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
- Epicurus

To live a pure unselfish life,
one must count nothing as one's own
in the midst of abundance.
- The Buddha

As you simplify your life,
the laws of the universe will be simpler;
solitude will not be solitude,
poverty will not be poverty,
nor weakness weakness.
- Henry David Thoreau

What if happiness were found in the serenity of simple pleasures.
What if we didn't need the newest gizmo... the highest high?
What if happiness is in the air we breathe...
slowly, deeply, and consciously?
What if happiness is one fresh grape, savored with gratitude?
What if happiness is in our oneness with all creation?
What if happiness is about enjoying life exactly as it comes to us -
without chasing after it?
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

[kmaherali]

How Your Clutter Is Costing You Money

Slide show:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/everyday ... tmd#page=1

Just because you aren’t living like one of the people on TV’s “Hoarders” doesn’t mean your home is as organized as it could be. In fact, living with clutter can have a profoundly negative effect on your daily life and even cost you money.

Here are six surprising ways clutter could be costing you. They just might convince you to take the steps needed to declutter your living space once and for all.

[kmaherali]

Mowlana Rumi's answer to questions asked by a disciple.

What is poison?

He replied with a beautiful answer - Anything which is more than our necessity is poison. It may be power, wealth, hunger, ego, greed, laziness, love (sex), ambition, hate or anything....

[kmaherali]

The Art of Letting Go | The Minimalists | TEDxFargo

Published on Aug 24, 2016


How might your life be better with less? Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, known to their 4 million readers as "The Minimalists," are the executive producers of MINIMALISM, the #1 indie documentary of 2016. They spoke at TEDxFargo about the benefits of letting go and living a meaningful life with less. For more info about The Minimalists visit http://theminimalists.com

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, known to their four million readers as “The Minimalists,” have written four books, including the bestselling memoir, Everything That Remains. They write about living a meaningful life with less stuff at TheMinimalists.com. Their new film, Minimalism, is currently the #1 documentary of 2016.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

VIDEO at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7rewjFNiys&app=desktop

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w7rewjFNiys
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[kmaherali]

Marie Kondo: How to Choose Happiness

Turning Point: An executive at Ikea declared that the West has reached “peak stuff,” with people owning too many things.

The Japanese word “tokimeku” means “to spark joy.” Someone who is adopting my method of tidying must take a possession of hers and ask: “Does this spark joy for me?” This question is the sole basis for choosing what things to keep in one’s home and what to discard.

But can we apply this notion of sparking joy on a larger scale?

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/opini ... &te=1&_r=0

[kmaherali]

My Year of No Shopping

Excerpt:

If you stop thinking about what you might want, it’s a whole lot easier to see what other people don’t have. There’s a reason that just about every religion regards material belongings as an impediment to peace. This is why Siddhartha had to leave his palace to become the Buddha. This is why Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.” It’s why my friend Sister Nena, an 85-year-old Catholic nun, took a vow of poverty when she entered the convent at 18.

Sister Nena was my reading teacher when I was in the first grade, and in the years since, she has taught me considerably more. When I ask her if there’s anything she needs me to get for her, she shakes her head. “It’s all just stuff,” she says, meaning all of the things that aren’t God. If you’re in the market for genuine inspiration on this front, I urge you to read “Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship,” by Gregory Boyle, a book that shows what the platitudes of faith look like when they’re put into action.

The things we buy and buy and buy are like a thick coat of Vaseline smeared on glass: We can see some shapes out there, light and dark, but in our constant craving for what we may still want, we miss life’s details. It’s not as if I kept a ledger and took the money I didn’t spend on perfume and gave that money to the poor, but I came to a better understanding of money as something we earn and spend and save for the things we want and need. Once I was able to get past the want and be honest about the need, it was easier to give more of my money to people who could really use it.

For the record, I still have more than plenty. I know there is a vast difference between not buying things and not being able to buy things. Not shopping for a year hardly makes me one with the poor, but it has put me on the path of figuring out what I can do to help. I understand that buying things is the backbone of the economy and job growth. I appreciate all the people who shop in the bookstore. But taking some time off from consumerism isn’t going to make the financial markets collapse. If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, I have to tell you: This one’s great

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/opin ... d=45305309

[kmaherali]

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

ELAINE ST. JAMES slides back her closet door to reveal a spectacle shocking to most American eyes: one pair of black loafers and one pair of boots, two skirts, two pullovers, eight T-shirts and six turtlenecks. And that's all. As a 52-year-old author and former businesswoman, she could afford more. But she doesn't need it. So she doesn't buy it.

That sparse sartorial tableau has its financial parallel in the personal budgets of Joe Dominguez, a former Wall Street analyst, and his partner, Vicki Robin: they live quite comfortably, thank you, in a middle-class neighborhood of Seattle on about $6,000 a year each, interest on their nest eggs of $100,000 each. They could easily earn more. They choose not to.

Gloria Quinones of East Harlem took a similar path when she gave up her $74,000-a-year job as a Legal Aid lawyer last year to focus on raising her sons, Diego, 10, and Julian, 14. The family now lives on her husband's salary as a public school teacher, and though she may not be buying any power suits, she wouldn't want them anyway.

"I feel free," she said. "I've broken out of that loop and I don't want it back."

Choosing to buy and earn less -- to give up income and fast-track success for more free time and a lower-stress life -- involves a quiet personal revolt against the dominant culture of getting and spending. Enough small revolts are now taking place, researchers say, to make a phenomenon known variously as Voluntary Simplicity, Downshifting and Simple Living a major and growing trend of the 90's.

This summer, pollsters announced the striking results of a survey measuring patterns of consumption. From a nationwide cross section of Americans, 28 percent said they had downshifted and had voluntarily cut back on their income in some way over the last five years to reflect changes in priorities.

Commissioners of the poll, the Merck Family Fund, a private foundation in Maryland based on the drug company fortune, said the 800-person focus group and telephone sample also indicated that 82 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "We buy and consume far more than we need." (Thirty-five percent said they had "upshifted" in the same period, in what the researchers said was a more traditional process.)

Many of the downshifters were parents who had cut their consumption to reduce working hours, thereby gaining time with their children. But many were also just responding to the yearning "to reduce stress, get more balance, get a saner life," said Juliet B. Schor, a Harvard economist who wrote the "The Overworked American" (Basic Books, 1993).

Voluntary Simplicity is an idea more ancient than Ecclesiastes, with stops at Buddha, Jesus, the Puritans and Henry David Thoreau. What is different these days, say those who are charting the trend, is that the seemingly unnatural choice to slow down and cut down shows signs of going broadly mainstream, across age groups and class lines. And, they say, it is taking on new power in light of Americans' growing environmental awareness.

Nor is it just an example of people playing monk or "yuppie conscientious objector," they say. Centered in the Pacific Northwest and with a full complement of newsletters, study circles, conferences and manifestos, Voluntary Simplicity "is exploding -- it's growing very rapidly, it's mushrooming," Dr. Schor said.

The Trends Research Institute of Rhinebeck, N.Y., has chosen Voluntary Simplicity as one of its top 10 trends of the 90's. It predicts that by the end of the decade, 15 percent of America's 77 million baby boomers will be part of a "simplicity" market for things like low-priced durable gardening and home products that are short on slickness and status.

They will be joined, said Gerald Celente, the director of the institute, by youngsters now in their early teens. "They're going to buy into the idea that we're overconsuming," he added. "This is the first group that's been indoctrinated green."

Since the end of the conspicuously consuming 80's, a striving for simplicity and thrift has been showing up in fields as wide-ranging as construction (architects note a tendency to renovate rather than to build) and physical fitness (witness the growing popularity of walking, a sport that requires nothing but a pair of shoes).

"Good sense tells you, 'Hey, maybe my landscape design should be less about a big power mower and big lawns and exotica and more about natural grasses that take little water and a little garden plot," said Travis Price, an architect based in Takoma Park, Md. "And sometimes you've got this wonderful mix of what your grandmother used to do, which was very conservative, and environmental sensitivity, and then just plain dollars and cents."

Mr. Price said that one of his clients planted thousands of dandelions in her yard in Aspen, Colo., thereby choosing a natural profusion of cheery weeds over a manicured lawn that wastes money and water.

For those simplifying their entire lives and not just their lawns, texts for neophytes are doing a booming business. They range from Duane Elgin's seminal "Voluntary Simplicity" (first published in 1981 and re-released in 1993 by William Morrow) to the Dominguez-Robin blockbuster, "Your Money or Your Life" (Penguin, 1992), which its authors say has sold 350,000 copies despite their advice to save money by getting it from the library, and Ms. Saint James's "Simplify Your Life" (Hyperion, 1994) and "Inner Simplicity" (Hyperion, 1995). Simple Living, a newsletter from Seattle, is a favorite, as is The Tightwad Gazette, published in Leeds, Me., with more than 40,000 subscribers.

Despite all its philosophical underpinnings, Voluntary Simplicity is a path of practical details and idiosyncratic choices. Its ideologues are aware that one person's luxury is another's necessity.

Among the steps they propose are:

* Buy only what you need; don't go shopping for entertainment. Buy what you can used, and wear things out before replacing them. * Dump household clutter. Move to a smaller place. * Pay off your credit-card balance and eliminate all but one card. * Opt out of holiday gift-giving if it feels oppressive.

Mr. Dominguez and Ms. Robin, for example, do not urge followers of their book's nine-step program to try to live as frugally as they do on their $6,000 each. They simply ask readers to perform some simple bookkeeping exercises to figure out where their money goes and how much they spend just dressing for work, getting to work, eating at work and recovering from work, and to decide rationally whether they are willing to spend their "life force" on maintaining these habits.

"We're going around whispering in America's ear, 'Why are you doing this?' " Ms. Robin said.

Mr. Dominguez added, "I got the brass ring and it tasted just like brass."

He also said that the country's top economists now say an increase in savings should be a top priority -- something that requires the kinds of changes that his program preaches.

Ms. St. James made her changes in midcareer. Sitting on the rose-scented deck of her home in Santa Barbara, Calif., and fresh from an hour of meditation that once would have been a luxury, she described a moment of epiphany five years ago, when she was a successful real estate broker. "I was sitting at my desk one day, and my schedule was full of phone calls and appointments and meetings with people, and I realized this was just not what I wanted to do," she said. "I had finally reached a point I think many of us reach -- of despair. We're tired of these complex lives and never having time to ourselves. I think the despair is coming from our souls."

She and her husband, Wolcott Gibbs Jr., a writer, decided to simplify. She gave up real estate. They threw away masses of extra stuff. They moved from their sprawling 3,000-square-foot house into a 600-square-foot condominium. They stopped their junk mail and gave up their newspapers. Ms. St. James cropped her hair to save the time needed for blow-drying. She distilled her wardrobe to its current limited palette of black, gray and white. She reduced her purse to a rubber band around a credit card, library card, license and money. She even stopped making the bed.

But if anything sounds too austere, Ms. St. James hastens to tell her readers, don't do it. Simplifying, she and other leaders of this trend stress repeatedly, is not necessarily about living in the woods or quitting work, or about deprivation and asceticism: it is more about dumping what doesn't make you happy in order to have some time for what does.

Ms. St. James's dark purring BMW, for example, is a source of pleasure for her. She makes no apologies for driving it, though she does note that she bought it used. Neither does she mind the daily hassle of caring for her two dogs, the gracious Piper and the newly acquired Channing, a seemingly hopeless neurotic. "Talk about complications to your life!" she said.

Similarly, members of a Seattle Simple Living study circle, an informal group that meets regularly with no leader -- laughed easily at their own inconsistencies.

For Cecile Andrews, a former college administrator who now runs Simple Living seminars, cutting back means having the luxury of time to stroll with her husband for treats at the Honey Bear Bakery, a homey Seattle cafe known as a hotbed of midlife slackers and non-cooks.

Janet Luhrs, a nonpracticing lawyer and the editor of the Simple Living newsletter (3,000 subscribers), relishes the sensuality of preparing her own food instead of "working at my job to pay the microwave people."

Ms. Quinones of East Harlem said that in addition to spending time with her sons and husband, she had been able to take a dancing class, to explore art and to begin learning how to sew while continuing unpaid work as a community organizer.

"I'm working on the right side of my brain now," she said. "I can take time out to be more creative."

For many, the frugal ideas of simplifying are not so voluntary: they become necessities after being laid off in the corporate brand of downsizing that has become the hallmark of the 90's economy. Mr. Celente of the Trends Research Institute said that after picking Voluntary Simplicity as a top trend of 1994, he chose Involuntary Simplicity for the 1995 list.

But the "involuntaries" add to the Simplicity movement, researchers say, even though they come to it in their struggle to adjust.

The vast majority of downshifters, too, Dr. Schor said, are not mainly motivated to reject consumerism.

"What they are doing," she said, "is experiencing a change in values or new priorities on what's important and making different kinds of trade-offs. They're saying, 'I no longer want to sacrifice my time, my sanity, my stress level to make money,' and lower income goes along with that."

In a guide for Simple Living circles, Ms. Andrews wrote that often the biggest payoff of frugality is freedom.

"A lot of people discover they never liked shopping or consuming much anyway," she wrote. "It was like being hypnotized, following the directions of some evil genie. We're like kids in a candy store, eating everything we can until not only does nothing taste good, but we get sick and begin a search for something more nourishing." How a Couple Scaled Down

KATHRYN AND THOMAS HENCHEN of Holmen, Wis., followed a procedure for would-be simplifiers that Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin describe in their book, "Your Money or Your Life" (Penguin, $11.95).

The Moment of Truth In early 1993, they began keeping a log of what they were spending -- not only in money but also in time -- to support the way they were living. In all (including things like clothes bought for work, food bought on the job and carfare), their monthly expenditures were $2,500 -- or $30,000 a year. Together, they were earning $45,000 yearly -- but were devoting approximately a combined 110 hours to work each week, including time spent commuting, getting ready and recuperating. "We didn't have time for a life," Mr. Henchen said.

Cutting DownThey scaled back, economizing on everything from food to car repairs. They began using the library instead of buying books. "We also got free movies there and self-help tapes," Mr. Henchen said (savings: $550 to $700 a year). They switched to wood heat (savings: $250 a year), started clipping grocery coupons (savings: $250 a year), and Mr. Henchen began changing the oil and rotating the tires on their two vehicles (savings: $500 a year).

Cutting Debt After 14 months, they had paid off their mortgage of $50,000.

Gaining Time Because they no longer needed to pay a $500 a month in interest and principal on their mortgage, they figured they could work 50 hours less a month. In total, they cut their expenses to $900 a month. Mr. Henchen, 35, has gone from working full time as the head of a printing company to working part time in real estate. Mrs. Henchen, 36, who still enjoys her job as a full-time saleswoman for a photoprocessing service, says they use their added time to enjoy each other's company, see family and friends, garden and appreciate nature.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 21, 1995, Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Choosing the Joys of a Simplified Life. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/21/gard ... 778d3e6de3