Turtles-Paradise

Living a balanced life is something that I feel is they key to happiness. The growth of minimalism, the surge of interest in working for yourself as an online entrepreneur, the desire to live simply and connect with the people around – it all seems to be a reaction to a materialistic, and unbalanced life that has come to be seen as normal.

We are encouraged to believe that working relentlessly until we are 65 is what life is about. School has become increasingly like the world of work – where endless exams, projects, paperwork and uniforms take the place of play and exploration. Work has taken over more and more of our lives, with salaried workers regularly putting in more hours than contracted for, and those with part-time, minimum wage jobs frequently having to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened so that in 2006 the top 2% of the world population owned more than half of the worlds wealth. In order to afford the ‘standard of life’ that advertisers tell us is both normal and desirable, we are forced to take on debt, work overtime, and pay most of our income towards the upkeep of an unsustainable lifestyle. A few talented people make millions, a few lucky people inherit millions, and the rest are left to lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis.

The other day, I had to repot some of my plants. I went to the garden centre, and I paid for a few sacks of dirt. Yes, dirt – the very stuff this planet is covered with. Others pay for bottled water. It won’t be long before someone figures out how to sell us oxygen.

My very simple solution is:

• Spend less.
• Work less.
• Have more fun.

Spend Less

Downsize your house. Better still, get rid of your house. Live out of a van, or a tent, or a spare room. Learn to see the true cost of things – a £200 washing machine is nearly 30 hours of work at £7 an hour. A £400 iPad is nearly 60. A £200,000 house is 3.2 years of non-stop, 24 hour work.

The places to cut your costs are the places where you spend the most. Your rent. Your food. Your entertainment splurges. Eat more lentils. Is that chicken tikka take-away really worth spending an extra hour at work?

Work Less

Once you’ve cut your costs to the bone, you can afford to work less. Take a single part-time job. Start a minimalist business. Work from home. The less you spend, the less you need to worry about earning.

Have more fun

When you’re not working, what are you going to do instead? You’ll finally have the time to travel. To learn new skills. To cook properly. To have long, silly conversations on the telephone. To take long walks. All the things that you don’t have time for now.

I should make it clear that I’m not there yet. Unlike the many people out there that have succeeded in quitting their full-time jobs and spend their time doing what they love I still work 37 hours a week or so, and I still have a large rent payment and a lot of stuff.

But I’m determined. I’ve spent the last year reading amazing blogs. I now know that it is possible. In a year, we’ll be heading to a place we don’t have to pay rent. In that year, I’m going to work on getting rid of as much of our belongings as possible, so that we don’t have to pay to move it or store it, and so we can start with the wonderful possibility that empty space creates.

I’m working towards a balanced life. What are you working towards?

One of the things that often bothers me about ‘Eco-Living’ is the saturation of the market with products labelled as green, eco-friendly etc. and that as a result come at a premium price. It seems like a triumph of marketing more than anything else.

It also has the problem of penalising people on low incomes, who frequently cannot afford organic-cotton fairly-traded independent designer premium cardigans. Whilst I do believe that we need to put our money where our principles are, it should be recognised that a great many people struggle to make ends meet and often cannot even afford enough to eat. This is true both in the developed world, and in the developing world. The different access to resources between a large corporation and a small independent business needs to be recognised. The difference between someone on a professional income raised with a good understanding of ‘how money works’ and someone on a part-time minimum wage job who generally runs out of money before they run out of month also needs to be recognised.

‘Eco-friendly’ products frequently act as a way of assuaging guilt. They are a way of us continuing a pattern of consumption and convenience but paying a little more in order to feel like we’re still doing the right thing. Buying new clothes every season is not sustainable, regardless of how organic the cotton is.
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This weekend is the spring bank holiday weekend – a three day weekend (at least for those who don’t work in retail, call-centres, waste collection services, pubs, restaurants, and whatever other businesses have had to shift to a 24/7 working culture) that I take as an inspiration to celebrate the beauty of late spring.

Over the last week I have added six tomato plants to my garden, courtesy of a work friend who grew too many. I have also lost my two out of three of my thyme plants that had just progressed outside and then got battered by a surprise rainstorm.

On bin collection day I had no landfill rubbish to put – a testament to the compost bins more than anything.

The Great Decluttering Project goes slowly but steadily onwards. I have almost finished all my CD’s – a long task as some were full of old backed-up work and art that had to be transferred onto my hard-drive. I have discovered a company that you can ship old CD’s and DVD’s to and who will recycle them for you. SImply send the CD’s, by themselves, to

Polymer Recycling Ltd
Peninsula Business Park
Reeds Lane
Moreton
Wirral
CH46 1DW

Now, however, I am off to Wales. One of my favourite places to go, a quiet little town near Cardiff. I am going to spend time with a good friend, and just relax for a couple of days and enjoy being alive.

There are so many things I want to do.

Good things, fun things, exciting things. There’s about ten businesses I want to run, a hundred-odd charities I want to be involved with, a thousand hobbies I want to start, or re-start. I want to learn a language, learn to dance, learn a martial art. I want to be this, or that, or something else.

Picking one thing to focus on is hard. I’m the sort of person who gets very excited when starting new things, or visiting new places. I want to fill my days back-to-back with everything there is to see and do.

The result? Unsurprisingly, it is a myriad of half-finished things, and a number of things I’m competent at, but not skilled.

My biggest challenge is to simplify. Not to cut out the boring stuff – I enjoy 99% of my life. But to focus on one or two things, and not let myself be distracted by the next shiny toy.

I could list everything I wanted to do, and it would fill up an entire book. But these are the things I am going to focus on instead:

• My job. My 37 hour a week, conventional job. I enjoy it, and it has purpose.
• My husband and friends.
• Yoga. I love yoga, and it never fails to make me feel better. I am foregoing all my other brief affairs with other exercises in order to focus on yoga.
• My blog. I love writing, it is my passion.
• Food and gardening. I include these together, as I grow to cook, and cook what I grow.

These are my first loves, and the ones I have always returned to. I want to shape my life around them, instead of trying to fit them around the flavour of the month.

There are a lot of minimalist blogs out there that talk about the joy of being location independent. Living – and working – from anywhere. Travelling the world.

I have a confession to make. I’ve already done that. I started in University, by taking advantage of an exchange program, and was immediately bitten by the travel bug. I spent around a year living out of what I could carry, making my own shampoo, and travelling on a shoe-string.

And, truthfully, it’s brilliant. It is easily possible to live on almost nothing, especially when you have a network of awesome friends who are happy to let you crash on their couch for a few days. I spent my days looking at some of the natural wonders of the USA – the Appalachian Trail, Red River Gorge, and the Florida Wetlands. I spent my nights writing the amazing novel that would take the world by storm.

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