Living With Less Frees Us Physically And Mentally

The decision with which María disposes of books that until recently she did not hesitate to save from her moves is striking. She reviews them without much scruples, thanks them for the time spent together, the universes unfolded, and with an efficient gesture she arranges them in piles, ready to find new hands for them.

She feels that she no longer needs to secure all that knowledge and imagination on her shelves; she feels that they have long since become part of it or that it is highly unlikely that they will. Lately he is also giving clothes, magazines, gifts … and that this time he is not going to move.

But she wants order, a space that is not only physical, but also mental, because all those objects do not stop irritating her with a kind of constant murmur: they are there! She is not the only one moved by a simplifying wind.

Learn to live with less

In Pamplona, ​​after a divorce from which she is still recovering, Katixa has gone from living in a 200 m ^{2 house} to living in a 20 m ² studio . Before, it had a 1,000 m ² garden and now the meager 10th-floor balcony, from which, yes, it is intimate with the Pamplona sky.

Half the days her adolescent son lives with her. Releasing ballast has been an imperative in her case but also – what a surprise in such a difficult time for her – a blessing.

She did not expect that doing without almost everything that had surrounded her until then could sit so well: “I do not see myself as a paradigm of anything and I maintain a consumerist streak that does not subside, but I have learned something in the last three months: we do not need to three-quarters of what we have. “

The big lesson a small space teaches is that you can live with very little. “In my new house I have two cups, one for coffee and one for tea,” explains Katixa.

“I no longer have a dryer or dishwasher or oven. The refrigerator is half the size of the one I had. That forces me to be much more careful: I buy more per day and program the menus better. The result is that I throw away less food! I have given all the clothes I did not need. I have two sets of sheets: I remove one and put another. The same applies to shoes, bags and a thousand accessories that I had stored in drawers, boxes and shelves “.

Reconcile with the basics

He is content with two floors on the balcony and two inside. Enough at this stage of your life. “I was happy to get my hands in the dirt, but the garden took a long time to maintain,” he says.

Katixa notes an “almost physical effect” in the change. It has “less square meters to clean, less garden and plants to take care of, less clothes to iron, move and organize, fewer appliances to handle (I have a vacuum cleaner and… I prefer to sweep!) And less spending on food and electricity “.

He only sees advantages to this reconciliation with the basics. Although, yes, when visitors come, it’s time to squeeze.

Something very transformative that Katixa underlines is that she has gotten rid of her car and, with it, the traffic jams and the daily races that had her gripped.

She had not realized how unnerved driving was : “I have not taken the wheel for almost a month and I notice a wonderful indolence. I have returned to the pleasure of walking. I am freer and I have less stress. It has been like taking off a heavy backpack I didn’t know what I was wearing. “

But there is still something else. Katixa has given up having Wi-Fi in her house. “I think this is a very important point. The Internet is a black hole that absorbs time by heart. Now I am more aware of it. I have also reduced the gigs of mobile data, so I have to ‘ration’ my connections to the network when I’m at home. That makes me see the level of hook that I have, on the one hand, and on the other it helps me to dose myself much more “.

So many small big changes have ended up affecting his priorities : “If I had money now, I would first secure the rent and expenses and save my savings to travel or to go out to lunch or dinner with someone.”

Living with less, a growing option

In this time marked by excess, it is not surprising that sobriety is experienced as something restorative. More and more people are choosing to live with less.

In New York, in Buenos Aires, in Barcelona, ​​in different parts of the prosperous world , a movement is rising, still somewhat timid, that defends this life more in line with our human measure, in which the desirable thing is to have the right things from which one can take care and that they can help you, and not so many others that enslave us, overwhelm us or confuse us.

In the past we have already experienced the occasional indigestion of capitalism. Elaine St James wrote a hugely popular 1994 book, Simplify Your Life , in which she boldly recounted what she and her husband Gibb had done to untangle the complex skein that her successful life had become.

They were two yuppies on the bandwagon of abundance and one day, when she consulted her schedule and saw how it was overflowing with to-do lists, even several years from now, she wondered how her life had gotten so complicated.

The St James made decisions. They started by getting rid of all the things they no longer used. They moved to the other side of the country to be able to work where they wanted to live and do what they really wanted to do. They moved into a smaller house.

In the years that followed, they changed their eating habits, rethought the way they shopped, and drastically reduced their needs. To escape the maelstrom that had trapped them they went even further: they got rid of many obligations that robbed them of time, that which they later lacked to dedicate themselves to what really mattered to them.

They stopped going to parties and engagements that they had previously considered unavoidable (and sometimes – oh – they didn’t feel like going at all). They shortened their working hours by honestly assuming that those overtime they were going to do without was actually not productive.

The time gained was dedicated to the people they loved, to being with themselves and their favorite occupations. Wandering and exploring were allowed. They discovered that the void summons chance, magic, chance.

Two decades have passed and the books that invite us to put order and clarity in our lives continue to be in vogue. The magic of order , by the Japanese Marie Kondo, has risen to the list of best-selling titles in many countries and is already being followed by new “order gurus” with similar methods to “learn to shoot”, a concept that our ancestors it would be difficult for them to understand.

We have plenty of things

We have enough but we end up wishing for more. And in the meantime we continue to yearn for greater simplicity. We dream of minimalist houses with bare walls and open spaces, in which there are few but significant objects and that in that context shine justly.

We sense that having less – without the need to be poor! – is equivalent to having more: more time, more money, more possibilities and better things, with more sense.

What is at stake is a return to the essential, the experience of life without the often parapet of the material and the virtual. It could be that we have become prisoners of that security of things and social networks and have left there a lot of desire: wanting to be who we are, wanting to do what we don’t do.

Carmina’s radical experience

A radical experience is what Carmina decided to live at the age of twenty-eight. She bought a ticket to Buenos Aires with an open return, without concrete plans, ready to let herself be carried away by whatever life wanted to propose to her.

He had a need to empty himself and to understand. Before leaving Barcelona, ​​he sold his motorcycle, left his rented room and gave away everything he had collected until then: clothes and books. He left with a large backpack that, when he arrived in Patagonia, he replaced with a smaller one, in which he only included a change of clothes, a notebook and a camera.

He put himself “in the hands of the journey”, as he recalls, and one day he played hard and let circumstances solve the problem of where to sleep in an unpopulated area.

He was lucky, or maybe life provided it, but in a bus change he met another traveler with whom he had met days ago in another place. He could give her his tent because just from that night on he would no longer need it, they were going to accommodate him on the final leg of his journey.

Carmina spent one of the worst nights of her life there, alone in the middle of Patagonia, without a jacket … but indoors. What would have happened to her without that providential meeting ?

When she now looks back, she feels that it is not necessary to go so far (in all senses) to exercise absolute confidence in life, which showed her at different times that she was on her side, but that she could also have found accompanying her without forcing the circumstances.

Something he learned on that long trip to America where he washed his clothes by hand for months is that living with less “there are fewer distractions, it is easier to detect life.” But he also thinks that there are moments for the “more”, that “that more is not negative if it is aware that it is born of the less”.

The secret, he believes, is “to follow intuition and not desire. ” After that wandering time, he lost his return ticket to Barcelona and settled in Buenos Aires, where he has been working as a journalist for a couple of years.

Living 13,000 km from her hometown, having entered a “less” to later build a “more” made Carmina a little easier on a path that can still be traveled while living comfortably.

It is really just a matter of putting a little more order in all the life spheres, accumulating less, slowing down, lightening the schedule, reducing duties and chores (including those of a spiritual nature!) And practicing a general simplicity that does not be more than the expression of greater confidence in life. ?

“How many things are there that I don’t need!”

They say that Socrates, when walking the aisles of the markets with their stalls full of merchandise, used to exclaim: “How many things there are that I do not need!”.

Even then, the commercial offer extended its invitation to passers-by and it was necessary to be aware of what was really needed to feel very free regarding the excellence that others could sing of their products.

That imperturbability of Socrates in the face of abundance makes us see him infused with peace, serene in the face of the siren songs of commerce. Later, Seneca wrote to his very expensive Lucilio: “Believe me, true joy is austere.” And the Stoic’s phrase continues to seem to us in force.

None of the things that come from outside will fill us as much as the joy that we can find within ourselves, he reminded us.

Taking a leap of centuries, Saint Francis of Assisi once again gives us a lesson and says: “I need little, and what little I need, I need little.” Il poverello d’Assissi (the poor thing from Assisi, in Italian) has abandoned a carefree youth as the son of a prosperous merchant in favor of a strict life of poverty and religious observance that he will leave as a legacy.

So long later, his example continues to inspire to detach himself from the material and a Pope, the current one, has symbolically chosen his name. It is the first time that a Pope wants to be named after him.

Detached from the material

The discourse of detachment from the material continued to run more or less underground until the emergence of the North American transcendentalists in the 19th century. They take it up with their theses to some extent precursors of the hippie movement .

Henry David Thoreau states that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.” And Bertrand Russell, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, seconded decades later: “Finding yourself without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

The writer Robert Walser goes even further and is credited with saying that “it is good to be returned by misery to simple things.” He said it knowing very well what he meant.

At the age of fifty, he had stopped writing and was in the Swiss sanatorium in Appenzell, gluing bags and folding paper. He stood firm in his will to poverty. How to determine if the patient was truly ill or suffered from extreme lucidity and sensitivity?

Other greats of literature have also drank from austerity. Emily Dickinson undertook a most delicate poetic task from the bedroom of her father’s house where she spent much of her life, in Massachusetts.

She speaks in her poem 486 of that personal universe that she inhabited beyond the few things that surrounded her:

I was the smallest in the house.

I kept the smallest room.

At night, my little lamp, a book

and a geranium.

Arranged like this, I could gather the abundance

that kept falling.

And also, my basket.

Let me think … yes,

I’m sure this was it …

Better to enjoy than to own

Nothing is really ours, the French psychiatrist Christophe André recently summarized in his blog Psycho Actif. “Everything has been loaned to us and everything will be taken from us one day. We are only the tenants of our life, of our body. And much better, since what will make us happy will be to savor more than to possess!”

If nature is a source of so much enjoyment for something , it is because of the ungraspable nature of everything that happens in it, he argues.

One last interesting reflection is provided by Bert Hellinger in his Thoughts on the Road .

He described how he understood simplicity of spirit : “It means that everything that is mine belongs in my spirit also to everyone else. What I do not use or use can be used and used by anyone. This does not mean that it now belongs to him. If you don’t use it or use it, it also belongs to everyone else, myself included. “

“Simplicity of spirit – Hellinger continues – gives us inner freedom. It makes us serene, because it makes us admit that all human beings are equal in their needs. It makes us kind, generous, forgiving and great. It makes us rich in a special way. “.