730 things — Day 49 of 365

The connection of empowerment between what we think and what we do has a two-way flow.

Our mindset determines what we do — as one would expect — but what we do also affect our mindset. We see what we believe and we believe what we see.

The more people have, the more deeply entrenched becomes their mindset of scarcity. 

If they have a big house with a huge mortgage attached, and lots of maintenance and repairs; if they have a boat with mooring fees and maintenance costs and a hefty fuel bill; if they have three cars; if they have lots of leisure pursuits — craft activities, gardening, sports, gaming, etc, all generating a wish list as long as your arm and multiple subscriptions — the financial hole to fill just keeps growing. So the more they have, the less they have to give away. They aren't pretending; it's real — they've brought it into reality. 

I still remember an occasion when, as a teenager, I went door-to-door collecting for Christian Aid in our Hertfordshire village. Our family lived in what had once been the Grooms Cottage at the thirteenth century residence of the Bishop of London. So it was natural that I started next door in one of the wings of the erstwhile Bishop’s Palace, a magnificent building. I rang the bell, my neighbour answered the door, heard my request, and explained that she couldn’t give a donation because she had just paid her golf subscription that week. 

It was an eye-opener to me that a woman could live in a bishop’s palace and afford golf club fees and still maintain a conviction that she could not afford even 50p to help the world’s poorest people. She lived in a palace — in a palace — and she couldn't afford the smallest crumb to help people with no shelter and not enough to eat.

This is how the relationship between mindset and practice works.

Practitioners of simplicity, minimalism or extreme minimalism find their mindset alters.

I suppose there's a chicken-and-egg (as in, which came first) scenario to this, isn't there, because the mindset must to some degree pre-exist or the person wouldn't be trying out simplicity, minimalism or extreme minimalism in the first place. Even so, I — and many others — can testify to the practice of minimalism having a liberating, relaxing effect, engendering joy, and bringing increased confidence (or ability) to give and to share — a belief in abundance. 

The abundance manifests out of the minimalism. A Carmelite nun I once knew said to me that a problem their community experienced was that they kept inadvertently accumulating wealth because their needs were so small and few. 

For sure the practice of minimalism/simplicity is a very disciplined way, and I find it requires commitment and determination, and yet somehow it also brings something carefree and peaceful. It replaces a lot of the "I can't", and "I must", and "I should", with "I want to".

It isn't easy to communicate how transformative it is — perhaps especially in an era when advertising promises so much more than the marvellous product can deliver. 

But as practise deepens, mindset changes.

I remember an elderly employee of an old established firm in the town where I live, telling me about the attitude to the firm's staff of the former boss — now retired and deceased, but his memory still honoured by an oil painting hanging on the wall. The employee told me that his (own) wages were very small, and it was hard to get by sometimes. He'd had a conversation with the boss (a sleek and well-heeled individual) in which he drew attention to the huge discrepancy between their incomes. The boss listened to him, and explained: "What you have to understand, Ted, is that a man like me needs so much more money to live on than a man like you."

And, curiously, he was absolutely right. The richer someone is, the more money they need. I would have expected it to be just the opposite, but it's not. So the affluent lifestyle engenders in the wealthy person a mindset of scarcity. Their wealth imprisons them in poverty.

If they espoused minimalism and gave away all their accumulation and impedimenta they'd discover this (oddly) left them not with less but with more. Not more things, but more money in the bank, more freedom to do what they wanted and more to give away.

As Carolyn Hetzel puts it: 

... the number one reason that pushes and keeps us on this path [is] the joy, the happiness that such a way of life brings. It may seem incredible and even paradoxical at first sight: how can the absence of something make us happier than its presence?

Elsewhere in her book, she says:

I began to empty, to unclutter, to throw away, to give away, to sell, day after day, again and again, until there was nothing left to take away, keeping only the essential — what was useful and/or what made me happy . . . and this process acts as a trigger. It was like a revelation, which took me far beyond mere physical de-cluttering.

    I discovered the joy of giving, whether to associations or to my friends and acquaintances, bags of things I no longer wanted and that would be of benefit to them. And for that which could not be given, the simple pleasure of throwing away and seeing emptiness take the place of objects. I discovered the feeling of lightness and freedom generated by emptying my shelves, cupboards, floor and furniture — and this I hadn't anticipated.

This is also what Francis of Assisi discovered, I think.

What I am giving away today is somewhat connected with mindset; two books about managing swine flu and bird flu naturopathically.

I got them when the pandemic established its grip because I rarely go to the doctor, preferring naturopathic methods of managing physical well-being. I thought there might be similarities from which I could learn. But I never got round to reading them — and though perhaps I should, I think I never will.