Simple living: think again

George Bernard Shaw once told this story about his father:

I was about five at the time, and I was standing at my father’s knee whilst he was shaving. I said to him, ‘Daddy, why do you shave?’ He looked at me in silence, for a full minute, before throwing the razor out of the window, saying, ‘Why the hell do I?’ He never did again.

There’s probably no easier way to simplify your life than to revisit your reasons for doing something, and then stop doing the things that are done for no good reason. And don’t skip over the things that you are pretty sure you started doing for good reasons; thinking changes over time, and what made sense then may no longer make sense now.

• We thought Sunday School was a good idea, but after thinking again we decided that our children were already learning much more from us at home.
• We thought nursery and Children’s Church was a good idea, but after thinking again we decided that our children were entitled to worship with us, and there was no good reason that they shouldn’t.
• We thought owning a piano and sending our kids for lessons was a good idea, but after thinking again we realized that piano music played no part in our everyday lives, and that we had no desire to make it part of our lives.
• We thought ballet lessons were a good idea, but after thinking again we realized that as a family we never watched ballet and probably never would, and that your average godly homemaker would have few opportunities to ever dance in a ballet production.
• We thought gift-giving on birthdays and Christmas was a good idea, but after thinking again we realized that it made it more difficult to give gifts at the moment they would mean the most, not to mention that it led to a view of birthdays and Christmas as an opportunity to accumulate stuff; now we stick to cards and special treats for birthdays and Christmas, and give gifts when it seems appropriate.
• We thought it would be good for the children to study English grammar, but after but after thinking again we realized that what we actually wanted for the children was to be able to communicate clearly through speaking and writing, something that a knowledge of English grammar does not contribute to; now grammar has been dropped from the curriculum.

It’s good to have ritual, to decide on a certain pattern for doing things and stick with it, rather than to deal with recurring situations spontaneously. It’s good to know how you are going to discipline your children, and how they are to address you and one another, and what will be happening between supper and bedtime, and when bedtime is, and the age at which bedtime changes, and what is expected of a child at bedtime. And it’s perfectly fine to set a pattern as an experiment, to see how it works out. But if a pattern doesn’t seem to be working, or used to work when the kids were younger but now is ineffective, it’s time to revisit our decisions and see if the reasons for them still hold.

It’s also not a bad idea to occasionally think again about things that used to be ritual but have one way or another faded from family life. Sometime a ritual fades because it no longer seems useful—and sometimes it fades through our own laziness. Because of shifting family activities I allowed nightly read-alouds to drop through the cracks, and my laziness kept them from reappearing on the schedule when it became feasible. But we decided that our original reasons for having them were valid, perhaps more valid than ever, and so I buckled down and started them up again.