Quote for the day: Just human beings

"By thinking of myself as just another human being, my perspective of others has also changed...I can now meet people who own a lot of things or are blessed with enormous talent without feeling embarrassed about myself...Rich or poor, famous or ordinary, we're all just human beings who come into contact with one another." ~~ Fumio Sasaki, Goodbye, Things

Is decluttering only for the wealthy? (How to be a better materialist)

Minimalist blogger Joshua Becker recently linked to a Wall Street Journal article about Baby Boomers downsizing. The story seemed to be aimed at upscale readers whose biggest downsizing headache is selling off their art collections.

On the other end of the scale is this blog post at This Simple Balance: 8 Tips for Decluttering on a Low Income (from a mom who's been there). This writer points out the difficulty of asking "Does this bring joy?" when the bigger concerns are "Is this still functional?" and "What if we can't afford another one?"

Our family lived on one income for a long time, and then on even less as we moved to self-employment. We did go through tight-budget, don't-say-no-to-anything times, especially when the kids were young and seemed to need different-sized shoes and clothes every time we turned around.

And even that, compared to serious poverty in this country and overseas, was really nothing. We still had lots of clutter and overload, partly because we got too good at scrounging, and partly because we figured we would eventually find uses for stored stuff. (Often we did.) We were also holding on to many childhood and family items.

So are minimalism and decluttering only options for those who don't have to get anxious about living with less, or about giving away possibly useful things?

I agree with This Simple Balance that some minimalist maxims and strategies work better for those who have more choices. But everybody needs a little of what Amy Dacyczyn calls "margin": clear spaces around things and events, so that we appreciate them properly.  And we may actually benefit when we use our imaginations to repurpose things, or our generosity to share them.

Many of us have stories of our children, or ourselves as children, cherishing one toy, or improvising playthings. When our oldest was a toddler, she used a kitchen chair as her toy stove, with a few yard-saled toy pots. A few years later, we found a large plastic "play kitchen" on Kijiji for her younger sister. Yes, they played with it, but it was an eyesore in the room, and it was always a mess. Then there was even more stress when they outgrew the thing and we suggested passing it on. That would never have happened with a kitchen chair, right?

We also need to claim the right to say "enough," no matter what our income. Someday, sooner or later, the whole economy could change so that we can no longer easily access consumer goods. We might be trading chicken eggs for plumbing work, and making over old clothes because we can't get new ones.  But even then, we have the right to live with, use, and enjoy just enough, and to say no to whatever multiplicity we're stepping on and tripping over. We should feel free to be That Family or That Person, the ones who always sing the same songs, play the same card game after meals, or stop at the same deli on weekends. Maybe your grandchildren will remember your one and only cookie recipe, or your beat-up hat. Call those things quirks, call them traditions, call them your signature item; but don't call them bad things. The author of Affluenza says that if we were a truly materialist (vs. consumerist) culture, we would resist buying new old couches and coats, because we're so fond of the ones we have.

For a few of us, choosing to live with less may start with trimming down the artwork. For others, it's cleaning out the basement once and for all. But the key seems to be, not idolizing, but learning to cherish.

Something to read today: hard, honest talk about minimalism, clothes, and stuff like that

Worth reading:  7 Things Building a Plus-Sized Capsule Wardrobe Taught Me.

From that article:

"When I gained weight in college, finding decent clothing on a budget became even more difficult. Although I still love the orderly cohesiveness of the capsule approach, I think it's important to be aware of the potentially problematic nature of contemporary 'magazine minimalism' that treats making do with less as the latest trend."

Way way back, I wrote a post here on the Treehouse about expensive (but nice) designer toys, Trendoids Spend Lots to Scale Back. I've had similar concerns and conversations about the luxury of being able to super-fine-tune one's diet, or about the trendiness of "tiny houses." These are, to some extent, problems unique to a culture that has enough goods and enough money for people to make those choices. We think of the creative and resilient pioneers and Depression-era survivors, those who made their potato-peel pies and whatnot; but they were as happy as anyone else when times got better. Laura Ingalls Wilder did not spend her later years wishing to eat only wild game and cornbread. Years ago I knew of an "intentional community" that was formed, with the highest of ideals, by a group of overall-wearing, long-haired couples in the 1970's. By the time I visited, ten or fifteen years later, most of them had moved back to the city with their children. Rural realities were not all that romantic.

What about those of us who live on a low budget because of choices we have made (such as staying home with children), who stretch food, make low-cost gifts, re-use, re-cycle; who really do depend on used clothing stores...but who still realize that "fast fashion" has become a problem and that excess, even extremely cheap excess, causes its own problems? (Is there any difference between our family's semi-retired lifestyle and that of, say, someone who was laid off, or a single parent who needs more work hours?)

I bought summer shoes new this year, and a better pair, from a better store, than I am accustomed to getting. For my ugly-bunion feet, they were totally worth it for a season of no blisters. I put an unusual amount of money (for me)  into the sustainably-made dress I bought for our anniversary. And I'm saving up for one more somewhat expensive item for the fall. Does that make me hypocritical, when I get most of my other clothes at the lowest possible thrift store prices? There have been times when it would have been all thrift store and discount store.

But yeah. We see the ridiculousness of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess in her spare time, but our own understanding of "simplicity" needs to be carefully considered as well. Does "less is more" help us to identify with those who have less, or insult them? Do we take on anything...food style, housing, homeschooling, church styles, because they are the latest thing that floats by, or because we believe those choices put our values into action?

Those are questions that we will just have to keep on asking.

Lessons from the poorhouse: The Hidden Art of Homemaking

We recently visited a museum in our area, one we'd never been to before although it's been there for years.  Small museums are typically housed in old mansions, or in school buildings; but this one's on the site of a former "House of Industry and Refuge."  The county poorhouse, in other words, and it functioned under that name until the 1940's.  It's a very solid-looking building, three stories high, with large grounds that originally held fruit trees and vegetable gardens.

Although there are other exhibits in the museum, like a log cabin simulation and a WWI trench, it's the blown-up photos and the in-your-face information about the building's history that seem to steep the whole place in unhappy memories.  As it says in the exhibit, once you were in this place, it was unlikely you'd ever be out.  The poorhouse wasn't an overnight shelter; it was a life sentence. (Occasionally young people, often children who had grown up there, were placed out as apprentices, but that didn't always work out, so they returned.)  The one thing that the "inmates" had in common, whether they were old or young, disabled or healthy, was that they had nowhere else to go.  Nobody wanted them. 

In 1992, PBS broadcast a series of programs called Millennium. One episode's title was taken from an African saying, "The Poor Man Shames Us All." In certain cultures (some more "primitive" than our own), there would have been no concept of allowing members of a community to be brought to such a point of desperation; people just took care of each other. In other words, the worst thing wasn't that there was a poorhouse; it was the fact that there had to be a poorhouse.  In some ways, the county administrators could boast that they were doing more than some other places to make sure that the poorest people were cared for...even having a poorhouse was considered something to be thankful for. Residents had a roof, clothing, food; oranges and hankies at Christmas. It was better than starving to death. But as Dickens said, "many would rather die."

Years later, the people who lived there have been reduced to a series of large, disturbing photo images on the walls of their "home"; is that so much different from their real-life existence?  Why are the faces in those photos so tortured and hopeless?  Was it just from years of poverty, added to mental illness or diseases such as TB, or was it not having anybody to really care for them (beyond each other or the few staff members who helped with their basic physical needs), and having no place to call their own?

The faces staring out from the walls must have been some of the most disconnected, splintered, lost souls of that generation.  Many of them had kind of flunked their life-management exam, and feeling like that is pretty depressing.  Others were there because loved ones had left or died; also depressing. That's a quick judgment, of course.  I don't know.  Maybe some of them were actually happy to have a permanent home, somewhere they felt safe.  Maybe some of them were Christians.  But the overall picture looked pretty grim to me, especially when you figure in the number of people who really needed more than just a home, needed psychiatric treatment, addictions counselling.  Maybe it wasn't so bad on a nice day if you were picking apples or something...but there's a lot of lostness about those photos.

What does that have to do with The Hidden Art of Homemaking?

Simple: all people need homes.  Homes should be part of blocks, neighbourhoods, communities, circles of people getting wider as you go on.  We need to create and preserve communities where people are not allowed to just disappear because there's nobody left to care.  But we start with homes.  Not necessarily two-parent-two-point-five-biological-children families; just places where people are reminded, through words and atmosphere, that their lives are important, and that they belong to the world.  It might be your own home; or it might be the "homey" atmosphere you help create in a classroom, a daycare, or a crisis centre.  Sometimes home can be a day place, even if you find a bed somewhere else.

So don't ever think that there's anything small or insignificant about making home places.