The Art of Zen Living

When I set out on this path, I remember thinking “What could be easier than living simply?”

Heh.  It didn’t take long to figure out that simple and easy are worlds apart.  The simple way to live is to bake my own bread.  It’s wholesome, nutritious, and has lots of good things store bought bread lacks, and lacks all of the bad things store bought bread has.

Easy is running to the store and picking up a loaf of bread for a dollar.  That bread, even if it’s marketed as “healthy” is likely to have a variety of preservatives, processed and enriched flour, high fructose corn syrup and any number of other things that you probably don’t want in your food.

Ironically, this is what I was thinking about tonight as I baked my bread.

So if living simply isn’t easy, why would anyone do it?  Let alone do it on purpose?

I can’t answer that question for everyone that lives this way, but I can answer that question - for me - in a single word.

So they can be free.  OK, so maybe that’s 5 words.  Perhaps I could say “freedom”, and yet that word carries connotations that make it different from what I’m talking about.

How many things in your daily routine are designed (and more importantly, marketed) to “save time”?  It used to be that I’d get up in the morning and shave with an expensive, modern, multiblade cartridge razor - because it was faster than using the old style razor.  All I had to sacrifice was a bit of quality in the shave itself.  Oh, and I had to shave every day.  Since I started using the old style double edged safety razor, it takes me about 50% longer to shave in the morning.  I also only need to shave every other day.  My skin is also in much better shape.

OK, so I’ve “saved time” with my “quick and easy” cartridge razor.  Now I go out and load up my Mr. Coffee, which makes OK coffee I guess.  I don’t see how it really saves time compared to a French Press (which, by the way, makes WAY better coffee).  The steps are the same, just in a different order.  Again, all I’ve had to do is give up a little quality to use the “quick and easy” automatic drip coffee maker.  In all fairness, it was an improvement over the percolator - which made even worse coffee.

I do think that some of our devices do save time - I can’t really argue about the clothes washer.  The clothes dryer, on the other hand, sucks down a fair amount of electricity for what it does, and using one of those instead of a clothes line means we need to use products we wouldn’t otherwise need, like dryer sheets to treat the static.  Static that you don’t get on a clothes line.  A clothes line will also extend the life of your clothes since they aren’t being tumbled against each other.

I could go on, but I don’t think I need to.  My entire day used to be filled with one “time saving convenience” after another.  In the end, I went to bed at night feeling even more disconnected from my life, and no matter how many time saving items, tricks and techniques I added to my day, I never actually got everything done.

I spend more time now on mundane tasks.  I bake my own bread rather than buying it - once you’ve done it a few times and have the system down, it probably takes 20 to 25 minutes - I bake one loaf at a time, but it would take no longer to bake 2 and freeze one.  When possible I buy fresh produce and process it myself - one thing I’ve learned about being a vegetarian is that there is a lot of chopping involved.  I look for ways to remove the barriers between myself and my life - because in the end, it seems as if that’s what all these time saving devices are - barriers.  Nothing more than stuff we’ve been told that we must have to make life work.  In fact, most of it we not only don’t need - we’re better off without it.

As I remove more and more of these items from my life, I find that I go to be more and more often feeling as if I’m actually living my life, and as I look back on the day, I find I have more and more days where I have completed all the tasks I wanted to get done that day.  It’s a good feeling.