Photo: Lindsay Crandall
I take a lot of walks with my husband and our dog. She’s a rat terrier. Think of a Jack Russell with longer legs and smoother hair and you’ve got it – she’s hyper and she’s a handful. Because I’m almost nine months pregnant, the purpose of our walks are twofold: I get some exercise (which is supposed to “help things along”), and she gets a lot of energy out. She zigs and zags around, sniffing everything and dragging us behind her. She’s only 17 pounds, but I won’t walk her alone anymore for fear she’ll tip me off balance.
Occasionally, we’ll drive her to a nearby park – one that’s adjacent to the art museum and filled with sculptures, ponds, and lots of Canadian geese. She has plenty of room to explore and, of course, chase the birds. Last week, my husband led her down to the edge of the pond and she ran in at full tilt. She splashed around and barked at the geese until she realized she was up to her neck and swimming and the birds had all flown away. As we continued walking along the pond, she kept climbing down to get back into the water. My husband and I found all of this hilarious. After a swimming fiasco a few summers ago, we figured she wasn’t much of a water lover. I guess we were wrong.
As we continued our walk, I found myself thanking God for this life he’s given me. With so much beauty around me, a dog totally in love with life, a husband who I adore, and a baby on the way, I couldn’t help myself but give thanks. I know this sounds idyllic, but it was an idyllic moment, one where I was struck with how satisfying a simple life can be. I covet these moments. I savor them.
It seems that most people my age are so busy. They’re “out there” living life, spending money, and building experience. And I’ve been doing it, too. I spent the first trimester of this pregnancy working a full-time job and teaching part-time, and it nearly killed me. I look back and ask myself why I felt compelled to do so much, and a large part of my answer is that everyone else was doing it.
Photo: Lindsay Crandall
But somewhere in the past few months, I’ve been wanting a simpler life. Part knee-jerk reaction to the recession, part desire to slow down and enjoy life, I’ve been embracing simplicity and living intentionally. My father told me when I was in college that one of the secrets of life is to do less. It’s only been recently that his words have made any sense. Doing less goes hand in hand with living intentionally, making choices about my time that are healthy rather than convenient. I’m learning how to cook from scratch, grow and care for a garden, knit and sew, and generally enjoy being at home. I bake and hang clothes on the clothesline in our yard and eat foods that are in season and, preferably, locally grown. I spent the majority of my teenage years trying to get out of the house in order to establish my identity, only now to have spent the better portion of my twenties in my own home trying to establish my identity.
In an interview in Orion, Wendell Berry said, “Simplicity means that you have brought things to a kind of unity in yourself; you have made certain connections. That is, you have to make a just response to the real complexity of life in this world. People have tried to simplify themselves by severing the connections. That doesn’t work. Severing connections makes complication. These bogus attempts at simplification ignore or despise the real complexity of the world. And ignoring complexity makes complication – in other words, a mess.”
According to Berry, we should be striving for a complex life: that is, real living. It’s simple to eat out or call a plumber when the sink backs up, or throw laundry in the dryer. It’s simple to clutter time with an abundance of activities outside of the home, or worse, with television. What we think of as a simple life is actually quite complex. It involves hard work, planning, and patience. In my attempts to do less, I’ve found that I don’t actually do less, just different activities. I try to pursue what I consider simple pleasures: taking photographs, baking bread, and connecting with friends and neighbors.
Photo: Lindsay Crandall
It’s become a philosophy of living, one that is certainly not easy. But it affords me time for reflection and the conscious enjoyment of the sweet and simple moments in life, moments I look forward to as my life goes on. Berry recommends having a plan: “A plan really is useful for signifying to yourself and other people that you like living, that you’re looking forward to living some more, that you have a certain appetite to continue the enterprise. But one’s real duty to the future is to do as you should do now. Make the best choices, do the best work, fulfill your obligations in the best way you can, and work on a scale that’s appropriately small. Make plans that are appropriately small. If you do those things, then the future will take care of itself. But if you don’t do those things, then you build up a debt against the future.”
Whether simple or complex, we need time to face who we really are, time to reflect on what and how we are doing. To me, that is ultimately what a simple life is: one uncluttered enough to give me a clear view of myself.