Social Misfits

Minimalism?

As a lifestyle?

It is quite the inviting and novel idea … one that seems to be surrounded by a lot of attractive romanticism … one that is easy to initially embrace. It takes a lot of love to keep the love-fire hot after that first kiss.

We'll not be quick to say that we are minimalists in the strictest sense of the word. Close. But not yet. It would be truer to say that we are becoming minimalists. None of us go from living a grinding hamster wheel lifestyle to living a successful minimalist lifestyle in one leap. It's a process that involves a lot of careful, thought out, calculated steps interspersed with a few good jumps here and there.

It is also a lifestyle that is best approached with a diversified self-reliant skills-set and the basic tools to perform those skills day-in and day-out. Without the skills ... we are always relying on someone else. Without the tools … we are always borrowing from someone else. Investing the time to learn how to do things for ourselves, and procuring the tools to do those things for ourselves, is never an unwise investment of time and financial resources.

None of us, at least in my opinion, will ever be totally self-sufficient. All of us, however, can be continually becoming more and more self-reliant through the development of skills and the acquirement of the basic tools to accomplish those skills. Especially in the areas of basic home repair and in growing and preserving food crops.

We have, over the years of our lives, learned a lot about cutting back, getting by on less, and living within our means. We have also taken that other road … the one that the vast majority of folks are on … the one that involves the vicious debt-cycle that turns people into tired, quiet and desperate mules pulling wagons that never empty and become easily overloaded. The object of life, once tightly harnessed to the debt-cycle wagon, becomes little more than a debt-paying trudge to keep the creditors satisfied.

Creditors care not one iota that we hate trudging. Our trudging, though it exhausts us and wears us out prematurely, is what keeps their institutional systems alive. Too often the things we trudge for are worn out before the trudging is done, only to be replaced with more things that require our signature promises to continue trudging. Too late we discover the truth that “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, (Whatever it is.) immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thoreau.

I do not remember when I read Walden the first time. I am, it seems only appropriate considering the stage we have entered into in our downsizing adventure, reading it again for what must be the fourth time.

This time, now that our library of cherished printed books has been seriously reduced in the downsizing, I am reading it as an E-Book. This is a major adjustment for a dinosaur that prefers a book in hand. I am adjusting. 

GRRRRRR! 

I can see us becoming frequent visitors at the public library again in the not so distant future.

There is a lot in that book by Thoreau. 

There is a lot of difficult to achieve life-philosophy stuff in it. 

There are only a couple of things people do with Walden once they've read it. (1) They begin striving toward a lifestyle that, as much as possible, emulates the philosophies and principles contained in it. Or, (2) they summarily dismiss it as the poppycock of a social misfit.

There's something about social misfits like Thoreau that believe(d) a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. (Prince? Politician? Potentate?) We happen to feel comfortable around social misfits and honestly prefer their company.