“Keep your accounts on your thumbnail,” said Thoreau. Sage advice.
Accounts form an area of clutter causing anxiety and mental
unrest to a considerable number of people.
Sometimes the concern is overspending and debt – this is the
problematic aspect receiving most media attention – people afraid of what the
post will bring, not knowing where to turn because of mounting bills and
insufficient income. Living in radical
simplicity addresses this magnificently.
For older people (this is not usually a young person’s
issue) the problem can be an investment portfolio too complex to understand or
keep track of. There is a drivenness
here – “But I have to do it like this
or I won’t get such good returns on my capital.” One sympathises, but simplicity will probably
return a better quality of life if not a better financial return.
A possible course of action is to estimate my needs for living
simply and responsibly, figure out how much income I need to achieve them, and
then call that amount enough.
I personally like to have a margin, a buffer zone. I am continually borrowing off myself. I prefer not to borrow from banks if I can
avoid it.
I am much intrigued and challenged by the resources
available at the present time about living without money. Charles Eisentein’s rather longwinded but
very illuminating talk here explains the essential nature of money – interest-bearing
debt – and looks into the questionable morality of the whole money system. He
makes the point that the money system is essentially dependent on economic
growth, and as we are now coming to an end of unexploited material for product
or market, the days of the money system are inevitable numbered. So sooner or later an alternative to the
money system underpinning our society will have to be found.
Mark Boyle offers a less rational but likeable and
interesting personal journey as food for thought in his book The Moneyless Man. He is on YouTube too, here and here (haven't watched those yet - only just came across them).
Personally, I am not finding myself accumulating money as I
continue to simplify; I can find a use for any money that comes my way! But I am finding myself able to give more
away as my own needs gradually dwindle.
A saving I have been very pleased with recently is my
transition from shampoo to bicarbonate of soda and cider vinegar for keeping my
hair clean. It works perfectly. I changed from buying shampoo in plastic
bottles from the store a while ago because it is so expensive and the packaging
so earth-unfriendly. I went on to
shampoo bars from Lush which have no packaging.
The only problem was there is no Lush store near me – and mail-order
adds p&p expenses and of course generates packaging again. This prodded me into moving onto the bicarb
and vinegar. It’s as cheap as can be,
and it turns out you can clean just about everything in the known universe with
one or another combination of bicarb, borax, vinegar and lemon juice. This gives me a sense of peace and quiet
satisfaction.
I have also been able to obtain, from an office where the staff
have a spring water dispenser, a large number of 15-litre plastic bottles. In the recent rainstorms, our water butt
filled to overflowing every night, allowing us to fill these 15-litre bottles
with rainwater, keeping one in each bathroom, one by the kitchen sink and one
by the indoor flower trough – so we can wash, wash up, flush the loo and water
the houseplants with rainwater conveniently to hand. This saves on chemicalising water and piping
it from distant locations, and saves us money we would otherwise owe the water
board. The bottles not dotted round the
house are useful for augmenting the waterbutts we have out in the garden, in
readiness for the drier days of summer.
Of course, stored water is quickly used up – but even some stored is
better than all of it flowing down the drain; and most of the year in England
rain falls often enough to cover most needs with rainwater, if we are frugal
and treat it as precious.
And, these days in our home we eat mostly vegetables, fruit,
pulses, grains, herbs, spices and oils (olive and sunflower). We have eggs too, in recycled boxes from
free-to-roam hens rescued from battery farms.
As our fruit and veg come mostly from local greengrocers they are
brought home in paper bags not the plastic boxes supermarkets need to use. Our soya milk comes in tetra-packs which can’t
recycle because they are foil and cardboard with plastic spouts. So when they are empty we take off the spouts
and put them with the plastic recycling, use the cartons as kindling and rake
out the metal residue from the ashes, sending only that to landfill.
It rejoices my heart that these simplicity choices turn out
to be life-enhancing. They are not
deprivation, they are the luxurious option. The houseplants do better with
rainwater, the clothes are softer rinsed in rainwater, the vegetables and
simple grains that form the basis of our daily diet make us feel so well and
alert, my hair feels softer and looks nicer than it did with shampoo.
It makes everything easier, cheaper and more
straightforward, at the same time as being a kindness to Mother Earth and
radically reducing packaging. Thumbnail
housekeeping as well as thumbnail accounting.
I feel sure Thoreau would have approved.
---------------------------------------------------
These bits and bobs also came with my camera and they haven’t
been used any more than the battery case was.
So out they go!
2 comments:
You inspire me, Ember! I've thought about changing over to bicarb of soda and vinegar for hair washing too but, as I happened to be in Cambridge last week (Watching 'Spamalot' with my brother - great fun!) I visited the Lush store there and got a shampoo bar. As you know from my blog I've just switched to bicarb of soda and cornflour for deodorant, and am amazed it really works.
I aim to get 3 water butts soon, when I can get Mum's handyman to 'fit' them, one of which will be for bathwater. I also have an old tin bath on the patio which has caught a LOT of rain in it!
As more people share their ideas so more people will try them - one really good thing about the internet!
Blessings x x
:0) Saving water is so important - counting it precious, and treating it as such. x
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