I’ve been thinking a lot lately about life - mine and my family’s, my dreams, hopes, aims and goals… I’ve been asking myself questions - how do I want my life to be? how do I want my family to be? Where are we all heading to?
Stressful modern life, sitting discontentedly in an office, busy schedule, cluttered home that’s used only to sleep (rather than to live)… I knew something wasn’t right, something was missing in me. That’s when I started thinking I needed to change my life.
The change is gradual, and still continuing because changing everything all at once is difficult in many ways. Financial restraints, time requirements, physical and emotional capabilities etc etc.. A complete change takes time and lots of processes to go through from where I am.
I started learning about self-development and discovered what I’m passionate about. Soon I started growing food in my backyard and raising chickens while I worked on to improve and take control of my physical, mental and emotional health - body, mind and soul.
I extended my hobby, gardening to growing own food, and practiced self-development strategies. These were two different aspects of my life I wanted to improve. Two different things that I think very important and fundamental… until today…
Today, as I read articles about those two topics, I realized that I was actually working on the one single thing. Two topics I thought are completely different and unrelated are in fact rooted in the same concept.
That is
Voluntary Simplicity
In a nutshell, it’s a concept of simple living or more accurately, it’s a philosophy. This philosophy answers to all my questions that I mentioned before. I finally found a clear picture of where my life is heading to. All my changes and challenges are coming from there. This was a quite bit of discovery for me. Once I understood where my goal was, I realized that everything I had been doing was actually related to each other. My challenges started to make more sense.
Stress management
It’s funny that I didn’t know what my clear goal is till now. I guess what was happening was, even though my view was going toward the right way, my reality wasn’t following as much as I wished. That situation made my goal something unclear, feel unreachable thing. Then how did I find the clear goal? It happened on one weekend. My husband had rough time at work and I noticed he was going for consumerism and materialism as a result of his stressed life. He craves for a more relaxed, slower life. He dreams of a rural life with a big land and the vast blue sky like I do. But as I said before, we cannot jump into there just yet. We are working toward it gradually. While we are working on that, he went off the wheel just a little. So we talked about it. We recognized AGAIN that it’s easy to let the stressful modern life take over our lives, far from our ideal lives. We might be getting a reasonably wage to buy everything we want ‘out there’ currently, but we reassured that the lifestyle doesn’t create a fully satisfying, meaningful life to us. What we decided to do right now is trying to reduce stress by simplifying our lives so that the stress won’t control us. We don’t want to go off the wheel by stress. Whenever and as much as possible, we try to live closer to the land, breath the fresh air, slow down and feel for deeper reflection that our changes give us.
Choosing voluntary simplicity is wonderful but I’m not totally against the artificial parts of modern life either. Technologies make our lives easier and convenient. The Internet is one of the greatest technologies I’ve ever experienced. We just lost our life balance over the years and trying to regain its balance. Simple thing like spending more time at home and having a life outside of workplace is getting more and more difficult. But we can take steps if we want to, and that’s where we are going. I’m certain that when we achieve this goal, it’s going to be a rock solid lifestyle that is very hard to lose the balance.
You too, can take steps for more quality life if you want to… please think about it.
... I appreciate your support.
