The Art of Zen Living

As the philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.  He did, however, go on to point out that if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.

The problem, as I see it, is that these days, Americans not only get what they need, they get what they want, but they think they need what they want.  We live in an economy created by marketing where items are designed to wear out, break or just become unusable due to the design of this year’s products being different.  We cash in for credit cards, look to our home equity as a “free money ATM”, and constantly chase The Next Big Thing.  We’re conditioned to react this way, pretty much since birth.  We accumulate more and more stuff, rent out rooms for our stuff, buy special storage containers to keep it nice, hire consultants or purchase special shelving units to turn closest into stuff-o-rama storage.

Let me put that last part a different way: we buy stuff FOR our stuff, so that our stuff will have a place to live.

I just got tired of living that way.

I’ve certainly been guilty of being a “gimme more” in the past.  I had to have a LCD HDTV, an Xbox 360, the latest and greatest computer, the latest games, latest cell phone.  I was always looking for something “next”.  Most of it just ends up taking up space. Many of you know that recently I did something about my stuff.

What I want to talk about today is how my attitude has changed in a short time.  I moved from an apartment to a house, and one of the major reasons I did so was that I wanted to plant a garden.  Suddenly, after getting rid of a lot of stuff, I found myself in a position where I needed more stuff.  Shovels, rakes, hoes, edging, fencing, pots and potting soil, seeds and peat pots.  Gardens, it turns out, take both a lot of work and a lot of STUFF!

So now what?  I know what I would have done in the past - I’d have bought it all.  You can never have too many tools, right?  This time, I forced myself to take a step back, and make some tough choices about what I needed, what I wanted, and what balance I would strike between the two.  This is all new to me - the result is that I’m not very good at it.  I did make a few rules for myself.

Rule 1: If I’m not SURE that I need it and will use it, I don’t buy it.  A friend suggested that I buy it and then if I don’t use it I can take it back.  The problem with that is that once it’s home, I’m a hundered times more likely to use whatever it is whether I need it or not.  So if I’m not sure I need it, I don’t get it.

Rule 2: I do not try to anticipate what I’ll need.  At first, that seemed like a bad, or at least inefficient, idea.  In practice, it means that when I get to the point I need to work on a task, I’m forced to see if I can figure out a way to do it with the tools I have on hand.  As a result, I’ve determined I don’t really need a regular hoe, nor do I need a bow rake.  I also don’t seem to need a standard shovel - the spade I have is doing just fine.  In tools alone, this rule has saved me at least $50.

Rule 3: Reuse and recycle as much as I can.  This means I’m saving old water bottles to cut in half, as well as milk cartons, egg cups, scrap wood and cloth - anything I can think of a use for.  Composting fits into this rule for me.

Rule 4: I always have to find a simpler, cheaper way to do everything.  There are no exceptions to this rule.  I never end up using the cheapest, simplest way.  This is a rule that is clear as a concept in my head, but doesn’t translate into words well.  I’ll use the compost pile as an example.  My first thought was to spring for one of those compost containers.  I’d seen a decent one that I could pick up for around $50.  Instead, I went online and found a decent enclosure that was bigger for $40 shipped.  Then I went down to Walmart and figured out that for $15.50 I could buy the material to make my own enclosure as large or as small as I liked.  Finally, I knew I could just pile it all in a corner of the yard and leave it at that.  I went with the “build my own enclosure” plan at the $15.50 price.  Pile it in the corner is the cheapest and simplist, but would have drawbacks - such as complaints from my neighbors and landlord - that I needed to avoid.  Another example is that the cheapest, simplest way to dig out the garden would be to use the hand trowel.  The garden would be ready for planting sometime in 2014.  The idea is to do the mental exercise of being ingenious in my methods where ever I can.

By following these 4 guidelines I’ve arrived at a point where I’m getting my garden planted with just enough.  I have a trowel, spade, shrub rake, warren hoe, watering can and a 2 prong cultivator.  I have a hose with a sprayer that does double duty in the garden and as a car washer.  I’ve determined I can do without a pitch fork, garden shovel, bow rake, lawn rake, cultivator and a number of other cool looking tools I don’t even know the names for.  What I have is enough.