The simplicity of slow living keeps me sane – it gives me deep joy, peace and contentment and enables me to live my truest life and be my truest self, in touch with the environment and connected to the world and other people in a deep, genuine and more caring way.
Would you like to be a member of the Slow Living Movement? Would you like to live slower? Or are you happy with the fast pace of modern life? It’s ok if you are. We’re all different. Some people love nature. Others love cities. But yeah – if you’re anything like me… well, I’m all for slowing things down a bit.
Allow me to share some of my experiences of simple, slow living with you, before we move on to the 21 practices that I believe will help you to transform your life. I hope these inspire you and show you how a few simple changes can have a completely transformative effect on your life. Let’s go!
CHAPTER 2
DOWNSCALING –
CUTTING OUT THE CRAP
One of the first things I did when I decided to simplify my life was to start cutting out everything that I didn’t actually need.
It sounds simple and it is. Many of us have a lot of stuff – stuff that we don’t use, stuff that we don’t even remember we have, and it takes up our headspace, sometimes without us even realizing. It clutters us.
Downscaling is about getting rid of what doesn’t serve us, in order to make room for more clarity, headspace and, well, new energy. Fresh energy. When we let go of the old, we make space in our lives for the new.
Many of us are caught in a life where we pay for things we don’t truly need – subscriptions, memberships, rental or hire charges. There is a constant demand for our money. We absorb hundreds, if not thousands, of advertising messages every day – companies and corporations WANT us to be constantly spending and try to sell us stuff that isn’t actually necessary.
What I’m getting at here is that I encourage you to really analyse just what you need to pay for and what you can let go of in your life. I’ll give you an example – I no longer use a smartphone for a couple of reasons:
i) They stress me out.
ii) I don’t want another unnecessary bill to pay.
Do you get me? Most of us are unknowingly stressing ourselves out just by following the ‘norm’ and buying things that we can, in fact, live without. Just because your brother, sister, cousin, best buddy, mum, dad and every person out there seems to have the latest iPhone doesn’t mean you necessarily need to have one too.
My downscaling experience
A few years ago I woke up and something in me just snapped. Something in the very core of my being declared, ‘I’ve had enough of being a slave, working jobs I don’t like just to pay my bills and taxes. There MUST be another way!’ And I prayed.
I took some bold actions: I sold two-thirds of my possessions and moved to a yurt in the middle of the Welsh mountains where I spent two years living totally off-grid (see page xiv). I learned that it was quite possible to downscale one’s life and to cut out a lot of the unnecessary shit. I reset myself. And I am so much happier living my life this way.
Less is so definitely more! I am not suggesting that everyone go and live off-grid in the remote wilderness – unless you want to – but that it is so worthwhile to apply a bit of scrutiny to your lifestyle and analyse who or what you want to give your hard-earned money to and what stuff actually matters to you. Have a look around you –can you see things you don’t need?
Experiment with downscaling. Spend a weekend decluttering and see how much better it makes you feel. Also, do some online research about the companies that are behind all the products you buy – choose where you spend your money carefully, and don’t buy from companies that you don’t resonate with. Look into renewable energy and pledge to make some changes. You won’t regret it.
Put simply: downscale. Cut out what you don’t really need.
6 TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE DOWNSCALING
1. Be RUTHLESS. Try and ignore the memories attached with old crap you don’t actually need. Throw it. Or better still – recycle it.
2. Stop ordering stuff! Just stop it. Each time you reach to click, stop for a moment and think to yourself, ‘Do I really need this?’
3. If you do bring a new item into your home – see if you can get rid of one of those items that you already own. Make space.
4. Make a conscious effort to approach downscaling your life with a positive mindset, focusing on how letting go of things will leave you much freer to move forward and start new adventures!
5. Seriously consider your phone. Do you need a smartphone? All the time? Experiment with making an old-style phone your default. And, after the initial cold turkey, observe how this makes you feel. Is the simpler, old-school way of doing things actually something of a relief?
6. Get friends to help. They can support you, help you make decisions and help lift heavy stuff – physically and emotionally!
CHAPTER 3
IN TOUCH WITH NATURE
Shakespeare once said, ‘The Earth has music for those who listen.’ I love that quote! Nature is beautiful, boundless, utterly fascinating, calming and deeply healing. If there is one bit of advice I could offer you in this mad world, it is this: get out into nature!
Nature is my remedy: when it’s all getting too much I take myself off into nature and I sit, I rest. I let my brain untangle from all the human stresses that I am exposed to. My mind is settled by the sheer simplicity and deep calm of nature.
Nature is slow. Nature is calm. It doesn’t rush. If we want a simpler life, then we can learn so much from nature. It can be our wisest and most effective teacher in showing us how to slow down and start enjoying our lives more. If we can only slow down enough to listen to what it has to say.
I recently found out a funny and mildly disturbing fact. Research has shown that the average amount of time most people spend outside of their car when they drive to a place of natural beauty is 2.5 minutes. Yes, you read that right – 2.5 minutes! That’s 150 seconds! And I have witnessed this phenomenon myself. Has this become the norm? To me it’s quite odd behaviour; people drive their cars in nature, get out, take a photo, and then get back in their cars again only to drive off to the next destination and do the same thing. What happened to us enjoying the journey?
This demonstrates how disconnected from nature many of us have become. Many people just don’t know how to slow down, but man do we need to.
Nature has relief for us – we can rest in nature’s arms, let our stresses go, turn off and sink out of our busy heads and into our bodies. In nature we can breathe out complexity, and breathe in simplicity.
How nature works its magic on me
I like to take myself off somewhere remote in the countryside, turn off my phone and stop. I sit or lie down and allow myself to sink into my surroundings. I FEEL it. I feel HER. Mother Nature. Pachamama. Gaia.
I rest…
My busy mind, calming.
I listen, for sometimes nature tells me things!
When I’m in nature – which is daily if possible – I usually hear the same message in my head, it says: