The Way of Simplicity

In my "Living the Questions" blog entry, the #1 question I have been asking is how we can justify lifestyles of excess when others have nothing? That has become increasingly more serious for me as dialogues have begun to open and books to be published (like Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty) asserting that we are living in a time when we have everything we need to end extreme poverty. IF we each do our part.

But for me a life of extreme simplicity didn't arise primarily from research and thinking and social awareness. In September of 2005 I had some amazing spiritual experiences that prompted me to give away my remaining precious possessions and start out on a journey of a minimalist lifestyle. And so I did. By that time I had already dramatically simplified my life in order to travel more with my writing, but this was a more radical shift. I quite literally gave it all away but what I could fit in two suitcases and my laptop case--and a box of memories stored with family.



From that point forward, my life has been a bit of a giant experiment in discovering the veracity of the words of Jesus: "a person's life does not consist of the abundance of things he possesses." It's been quite a journey. It's not one everyone has the choice to take or make, but it is one I can now highly recommend after three years of living it. The choice to give it all away and adopt a greatly simplified life of non-ownership and no ties allowed me the freedom from leases and caring for belongings to travel about the country during that time period and reconnect with past relationships as well as take more time to "see things whole."


Because this lifestyle of my past three years has been so dramatically different from the one I was once pursuing, I often get questions about how I did it. Housing has involved finding furnished places where others have extra space and something they need traded for it instead. I think this is a greatly underutilized idea that we will begin to see increase in days to come as people explore new ways of being in community with one another and in not needing to "possess" things in order to enjoy them--and life.

In my experience of these past few years, in one case my housing involved marketing in exchange for a room in a residential inn that was set up community living style. In another it involved childcare and chores for a room with a large family. In another pet sitting for my housing. And in some cases simply paying rent by the week or the month--rather than signing a lease or a mortgage. My income source to support this experiment in a greatly simplified lifestyle has also been varied--and has involved freelance writing and consulting and picking up short-term temp jobs whenever needed.


I uncovered whole new sides of myself I would not have thought possible to develop--traits like adaptibility and resourcefulness and flexibility and ingenuity. But I also developed a new understanding for what millions of people all over the planet who have little go through on a daily basis. Even with my minimalist lifestyle and capping my earning at under $12k/year for the past three years, I am rich compared to a vast majority of the world's population. And that is something I had greatly lost sight of as my income climbed during the previous years from $30k to $50k to $75k to six figure earning potential and mapping out strategies for making a million a year.



The more I earned the less the money meant to me. The less it satisfied and the more it seemed like it would require to really live the lifestyle I thought I was after and the faster I seemed to go through it without even realizing I was. The ideas I justified to myself about the poor and those in need during that time period in my life horrify me now. I specifically remember a time when I was upset with the others with me who wanted to give away their leftovers from a restaurant meal to a disabled vet in the parking lot. Ouch. But if you are in strong pursuit of accumulation, you sometimes feel you have to protect what you are spending your life in pursuit of. And that includes the mindset that "only the strong survive and deserve."

I do not plan to live at quite this level of austerity for the rest of my life, but I do plan to live on $30k or less a year. Giving away all that I owned a few years ago did not let me off the hook where the good of the whole is concerned! Part of what I still have to give is my money-making potential, and so I am now in a season of exploring what it will look like to put roots down in my chosen city of Santa Monica and for me to reactivate the money-making machine I was once rapidly becoming. The difference this time is a choice made in advance to cap my lifestyle so all the rest can be given away to the whole.

"Take only what you need; wisely use everything you have; give the rest away." That is the 3-part motto I want to live by and be part of sparking a radical revolution around. If we all live by that phrase, there is literally enough for the whole. And in my own journey of seeing what it is like to have little and to be out walking daily around those who have even less, the beauty and power of wanting to see extreme poverty ended wells up inside of me in songlike ways and I hope I can be one of the forerunners in making it possible worldwide.

A friend who'd been exposed to some of what my lifestyle was like "back in the day" visited me earlier this year and said he was inspired by the choices I was making. He bought me an engraving that has become one of my new precious possessions. It reads, "A rich person is not one who has the most but one who needs the least." May it become true in our time.