The Satisfaction of Enough

When I hit a wall with the whole work thing this weekend, I somehow ended up engrossed in organizing my online bookmarks instead. I came to the folder marked “simple living” and spent a little time going back to some of the websites I’d checked out a few years ago and for some reason had stopped visiting with any regularity. I’ve had a few brief, intense periods of being really interested in this concept of “voluntary simplicity,” which some of you may know if you’ve been paying attention over the years. I’m not sure what started it—I think it may have been a book my friend Annie gave me after I’d shown interest in it during a visit to her house—it was a kind of workbook for simplifying your life. I never actually went through the steps, but did read the author’s other book, Choosing Simplicity, and thought a lot about how some of the ideas it presented applied to my own life. Then time passed, and I got distracted by other things. When I was living in New Jersey, I came back to it, browsing some of the books at the library near my parents’ house and eventually buying my own copy of Your Money or Your Life. I read it cover-to-cover in just a few days, going so far as to write down my responses to some of the questions it asks but not actually working through the steps methodically. Maybe I will someday.