Firstly, I am one of the luckiest guys around in that my work doesn’t have to pay all the bills. In my quest to remove our family as much as possible from the monetary economy I’ve had the freedom to experiment without the day-to-day pressure of mortgage payments. Something I offer gratitude for every day. In a colossal understatement, THANK YOU to my wife Lou.
Yesterday we had a great day helping a friend sort out her pretty extensive garden which used to contain two large, very maintained, enclosed fruit tree ‘forest’ areas, and one more native based, huge, more un-maintained forest.
Part of the brief for the day was to remove one of these high maintenance forest enclosures and reduce the number of trees growing there. This section of the garden is habitually frequented by possums and rats, and so there wasn’t much reward for the amount of effort put in. When you factor in the pressures of life, this maintenance becomes more of a millstone around the neck, rather than a pleasure.
Let me also say that for the rest of us helping to remove perfectly good mature fruit trees, this was rather wrenching. Trees were indeed hugged, and we were able to give a few of them a chance at another year, to see if thinning it all out made any difference to her life.
Life is an ever-changing cornucopia of occurrences based on each organisms needs. As the earth constantly moves around the sun different forms of life behave differently to take advantage of the new conditions. A lizard baking on a rock in the morning sun, will probably find he/she is in shade in the afternoon, or hunger gets the better of them. Choices are made according to their needs.
We humans build and purchase shiny new stuff all the time. However, to keep everything shiny and new means it has to either stand still in time, separated from the natural way of things, or we have to do maintenance. Everything we do that is used and part of our life requires maintenance. Think about that for a minute. It is pretty hard to think of anything a human has created that we don’t have to clean, paint, dust, lubricate or feed in order for us to continue to enjoy it’s benefits. Think about an old derelict building. Nature soon moves in and starts to consume it without the intervention of maintenance.
A maintenance free existence is all but impossible without decluttering aspects which need it. Sydney city centre is enormously high maintenance. The forest is about as low maintenance as I can think of, but not completely without. No-one is wandering through the bulk of Ku-Ring-Gai National Park with fertilizer, however without regular cool burning, problems arise, but that is a whole other story.
How we view this maintenance is where the magic happens. It is about finding your personal gifts and putting the effort into work which brings you joy. I’m not saying cleaning the house has to be a joyous process, but if you sit down after the cleaning and wallow in a feeling of satisfaction, then some joy is being had, and the clean house facilitates peace of mind to enjoy other pursuits.
I am in a process of making my lifestyle as place based as possible. Which means I’m home a lot, and I have created a garden which feeds my soul as well as my guts, which in turn feeds my soul. Lou and I love being in the garden for different reasons, and so maintaining it is an incremental part of our day-to-day life. If gardening isn’t your thing, focus on what is. Bread making, sewing, carpentry, writing, music. One of the enormous side effects of decluttering life like this is the need to share my passion with others – giving away food, writing blogs like this, getting the guitar out around the campfire etc etc. Joy abounds and infects all you meet. One of my great irritations is that humans don’t place much value on community building, social pursuits and so paid work that brings joy can be extremely elusive.
The maintenance of my own creations is noticeably less grating on the nerve endings than objects I purchase from the shop that should just work but aren’t. Purchasing something removes my attachment to it and makes it easy to throw away. This leads to thinking about the waste of money, questioning why it was purchased in the first place, and erodes self confidence in my choices. When I really think about what it is I need, rather than just want, I weigh up the future maintenance requirements of the shiny new thing. Is this going to give me joy, or is it going to sit around, join the clutter and become a millstone? If I’m in doubt, I don’t purchase it. I ask other people who have one to see how they fit it into their life. My conscience eventually arrives at decision I’m happy with if I listen to it enough.
Maintenance and ‘work’ is what I make it and how my upbringing and beliefs have conditioned me. Most of my real ‘work’ has been relaxing and refining my internal view of work and what it means to me and my family. Realising the greater economic machine I’ve been brought up in doesn’t offer much in the way of meaningful joy. It has taken an awful long time to include decluttering and maintaining myself, which gives me the confidence to finally express thoughts like this. So if you don’t mind, today is Sunday and I’ve got some maintenance to do….
