If I were trying to simplify my life just for my own sake, or even for Debbie’s sake, I probably wouldn’t work too hard at it. It’s late in the game for us, we’ve learned to endure and in some ways even to enjoy modern on-the-edge living, and it will be difficult, tedious, and frustrating for us to get anywhere close to the goal.
But we’re not doing it for ourselves, we’re doing it for our kids, and for their kids after them. They are already living a much simpler life than we ever hope to live. We’ve shielded them from news and mass entertainment and peer pressure at schools. We’ve given them meaningful work to do in our home economy. We’ve taught them not to find their joys outside the home, but in the company of their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers.
We’ve taught our sons that it is good and necessary to establish a family and provide for its needs. We’ve taught our daughters that it is good to be a helpmeet and a mother, a keeper at home. To this end, we’ve taught them the skills they need to live such a life properly, even if it meant that we had to first acquire those skills for ourselves. And we’ve taught them not to disdain any such skill, as the specialists do.
Consider these two quotes I read on Scott Terry’s weblog. The first is from Wendell Berry:
The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in a world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
And here’s what Robert Heinlein had to say about specialization:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnett, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
The goal is not to turn our children into renaissance men and women, but to turn them into self-sufficient men and women. They don’t have to be able to do everything, just the important things. They may choose to buy or hire out the things that are beyond their reach—or they may choose to do without. We want them to be in a position to make the choice. We want them to think like the slogan of Bob’s Pretty Good Grocery on A Prairie Home Companion: “If we don’t have it, you can probably get along without it.”
It isn’t likely that we will ever live a life nearly as simple as the one we wish for our kids. But we can avoid saddling them with habits and desires and weaknesses that will cripple them in their own efforts to live a simple life. We can model for them, however imperfectly, what it is to try to live simply. We can instill in them a love of what is good and proper for a family, along with a deep understanding of how complexity steals those things from them. And we can demonstrate for them how much can be accomplished when a mother and father strive against their own weaknesses and invest their energies and hopes into setting their family on the right trajectory.
Amen and amen!
(BTW, it’s Ralph’s…)
“Pioneering ain’t easy”, oh but how sweet it is.
Well said, Rick. I love the quotes; I’ll put invasion planning on my to-do list. Is there a website recommended for that
?
I just finished my first reading of Wendell Berry (Art of the Commonplace), though I had heard him indirectly for years through you, Ken Myers, and others. Much of what WB wrote began to sink in easily, though I think it will take at least 6 months of steady pondering for the full impact really begin.
Hi! I’m a former homeschooler who has an almost two-year-old son and another miracle on the way. And I’m writing because I want to know how I can cultivate a simple, somewhat self-sufficient life, living in the suburbs, with a yard that is less than an acre. I worry as much as the next parent that my children will be swept up into a culture that I dislike because I don’t have the resources to teach them to live differently. What do you do when you can’t move to the country and learn to farm your own land? What do you do when your husband works as a federal prosecutor putting away criminals, but he doesn’t have the time or skills to truly learn to be self sufficient? What do you do if infertility and the limitations of your space mean that your children will not have 6 or 7 brothers and sisters? Sometimes I get very frustrated with homesteading, homeschooling blogs because I feel like the answer is always, “Move to the country to teach your children about real meaning in God’s world.” Let’s just say that isn’t possible. What do you do then if you want to be faithful and give your children a heritage of meaningful life? Is there anyone out there who’s writing about how to do this in the suburbs? I know this is a rant, and I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I’m just frustrated, and I’d like some ideas that I can actually accomplish.
Ellen,
Is there anyone out there who’s writing about how to do this in the suburbs?
Yes, but in my opinion they suffer from the same shortcoming that you are finding in the homesteading/homeschooling blogs, which is that they present you with their own solution rather than helping you think your own way through the problem. What I write on this blog is meant to help you simplify your own life by explaining how we’ve thought through the issues I raise here. To blindly copy anything we’ve done would be to miss the point.
That said, I’ll offer you what I think is the key lesson about simplicity, namely that life gets simpler as we work towards supplying our needs directly. There are two reasons for this. First, as we learn to supply more of our needs directly, we gradually wean ourselves from dependence on the complex and fragile social structure that supplies them for us. Second, supplying our needs directly is not easy, and so the more we can do to eliminate clutter from our lives the more time and energy we have left to tend to our true needs.
Some specific suggestions which I think your circumstances would allow:
Learn to prepare and enjoy simple meals from home-grown food. Grow some of it yourself if you can, buy the rest from people who have grown it themselves, a neighbor or a local farmer.
Make something that you use, and use it. Soap is a good first project. Consider making more than you need, and selling the surplus.
Stay home. Eliminate unnecessary errands. Reduce commitments that require you to spend time away from home, especially if you need to drive there. Learn to enjoy time spent at home, especially family time.
Get to know neighbors within walking distance of your house. Particularly retired neighbors, who are often fountains of wisdom and are always delighted when younger people take an interest in them.
Reduce your debt.
Reduce your media intake—television, radio, magazines, newspapers, videos, internet.
Make a serious study of the culture that surrounds you. Learn to discern and combat the subtle forces that keep you unknowingly enslaved to modern industrial living.
These suggestions, like everything else I write on this weblog, are not any sort of program; they are only meant to help you begin to think about what might be possible in your own life, given your own circumstances. Your own path could very well end up being quite different from ours—and, if it does, I hope you’ll take the time to share some of the details with us, so that we can learn from your own experiences.