Images and text from Practising Simplicity by Jodi Wilson, photography by Jodi Wilson. Murdoch Books RRP $32.99.
I’m not here to nag you and tell you that you need to live with less stuff. Nor will I tell you that owning less is a sure and certain path to happiness. But let me tell you what it’s like to carry all you own with you, to choose those items with care, considering their purpose, size and weight, to reduce your consumption and increase your free time and to realise that everything you need in life can fit in a caravan along with those you love most—for me that was one grown man and four growing children.
If you had asked me to holiday in a caravan four years ago, I would have baulked at the suggestion. Daniel suggested it one day while I lugged the washing from the line to the lounge and I bellowed down the hallway: ‘A road trip in a caravan is not a holiday!’ At the time, I couldn’t think of anything worse than squashing my family into a van and attempting to make dinner on a tiny bench space before having to wash the dishes in a sink fit for three bowls. But because time and perspective and choice and change are all wonderful things, I came to see the tiny space of a van as an opportunity instead of a hindrance. There was work involved—as there is in life, no matter where or how we live—but I started to consider the boundaries as an experiment in learning to live with less. Here was my opportunity to significantly downsize, live with no fixed address and only the essentials. Everything had to earn its keep although, I admit, the ephemeral items—the kids’ craft and nature collections found on empty beaches and desert paths—joined us, too.
While I don’t expect you to live in quite the same snail-like fashion that I have for the past few years, you may like to consider the concept of breathing space and thinking space: the space free of stuff and clutter, in your house and in your mind. Because when there’s less stuff to take care of you have more time and you realise that the things you accrue sometimes aren’t worth the hours you spent working to pay for them. Weighing up frivolous consumption and precious time is a really tangible way to practise simplicity and it can, if you let it, shift the way you see the world and influence how you live. You start asking yourself: what do I value—time or things? And I find this question naturally leads to ruminations on the sheer amount of stuff that already exists in the world and the blatant fact that we are consuming more than at any other time in history, to the detriment of the natural world and its resources.
It’s really easy to be confronted and silenced by the reality of a world in crisis and our responsibility for it. But if you believe that your choices matter, and that they can be a catalyst for change, you’ll be spurred to stay on a path of living with less and find it’s actually quite rewarding. I’d even go as far as saying it’s life-affirming.
For me, it started with the dishes. When we were living in a house and navigating life with three children and a newborn, I spent many evenings cursing the mountain of dishes on my kitchen bench. I loathed them with such passion that no attempts at mindfulness could relieve my frustration. I’m sure a dishwasher would have helped, alas we were living in a rental and no amount of kindly worded emails would convince the owners to install one. Daniel regularly worked late and I, having just put the children to bed with stories and back rubs and milk, would trudge down the hallway and muster the energy to deal with the towers of plates and cups, lunch boxes and snack bowls, pots and pans. I knew it would take me over an hour to get through them, even longer if the baby woke. I cursed myself multiple times for not rinsing the bowls that now had hard porridge caked to the side, unbudging—the kind that needs a good soak and the patience of anyone other than a bedraggled mother at 9 pm.
We had an entire kitchen full of cutlery and crockery, teacups and pots, kids’ segregated plates and Tupperware containers with too many lids. But, in the van, we survived with one frying pan and two saucepans, a bowl and a plate for each of us, a few cups and ample cutlery. We washed the dishes in our tiny sink and towelled them dry, and not once did we feel like we needed any more. And if something broke? We just popped into the local op shop to replace it.
This new simplicity, of cups and cutlery, was life-changing. It freed up time and space and relinquished the dread of those evenings spent with my hands in the suds. (I also passed on the morning and evening dishes routine to my two eldest children, which was met with a year’s worth of whinging, but is now an accepted part of their day.)
I’m realistic; I know that regardless of where we live and what is happening in our lives, there will always be dishes. As the Zen Buddhist proverb goes: ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’ But I’m in control of how many dishes we own and if we can eat three homemade meals a day and get by on the basics then it’s hard to ignore the maths. It turns out that simplicity is also about restraint, which I believe is a discipline worth celebrating—one that allows you to say no, cherish your belongings and avoid the excess: stuff, and decisions. Living with less isn’t just about the things we accrue and keep. It’s also about having fewer expectations and less pressure, less work and debt, less to clean and less to sort. And although you may live with less, you end up with so much more.
On the road, during the weeks that we were most frugal and filthy, and especially when we free-camped and lived remotely, we agreed that we’d never had it so good. I was continually fascinated by the fact that we were so content in a tiny home with only the essentials (times six, that is). We had packed our necessities: clothes, shoes, wet-weather gear, towels, toiletries, a medicine kit, kitchen basics, a beach umbrella, a few toys, stationery supplies and a rotating collection of books that we would swap at street libraries and caravan park laundries. It was everything and enough, and perhaps most pertinent of all: we didn’t want for anything else. As the weeks and months passed, I reflected, quite regularly, on the significant shifts we’d made and how different I felt with so little to take care of. And this is the very crux of living with less, for me. When we lived in a house, with full cupboards, albeit full of consciously sourced, beautiful items that I loved, I still thought about them when the doors were closed. They may have been invisible to everyone else but I felt their presence and their weight, the pressure to take care of them, sort them every now and then, deliberate on whether or not they were still necessary in our life. They may have been lovely and useful, they may have filled a void, but despite all this they were still a contributor to my mental load. I may have carried everything we owned with us on the road but I didn’t feel the weight of it all because everything had a purpose; the little things and the big things all earned their keep.
While the life-changing shifts may have started with the dishes, they really became profound when I realised that without the need or desire to accrue, we didn’t have to spend time working for things. We had simplified our home and our essentials to such a degree that we’d freed up time. This is frugal abundance: working less to live simply, instead of working to buy things we didn’t need. And while I’d read so many books over the years, no amount of reading could have prepared me for the experience of living in a tiny home on wheels and sitting in the simplicity of it. Living with less gave me more time, space, energy and money. I had fewer obligations and more opportunities. I felt lighter. And so much happier. As Daniel remarked to me a few weeks into our trip: ‘We’ve just got to create our own opportunities for happiness.’
We may connect materialism with excess consumerism, but living with less actually prompts you to care more for your material possessions, to really cherish what you have. I’ve learned to be reverential with my belongings, to connect the purchasing of new things with the hours spent working for them and considering if there’s value there. And then, thinking deeply about where the product comes from, what it’s made of and who made it. If simplicity is about focus and intention, then you can approach consumerism in exactly the same way. And ask yourself: why am I buying this? What is its purpose? What do I intend to do with it? Can I source it second-hand? Is it something that will transcend seasons and time? Of course, it’s more complex with children, and perhaps even more so as they grow, but teaching them the virtues of patience, restraint and gratitude seems particularly important in this age of disposability and consumerism.
So how do you decide what to keep and what to let go of? It’s complex and, in my experience with four children, it’s ever-changing. I rest in the knowledge that it will never be finished, that there will always be some level of order but, frankly, there are always going to be odd socks. For as long as we are a family, living in a house and going to school and creating and growing and learning, there will be the miscellany that comes along with life: the keys, the drawings, the washing pile and the apple cores (inevitably prolific in autumn). Letting go of the minimalist aesthetic of clean lines and finished projects is a really practical way to accept that, often, our simple lives are a little messy and rough around the edges.
Simplicity is not concerned with perfectionism or, in fact, staunch minimalism. It’s more authentic than that. It’s growing a garden and letting it go to weeds when life gets too demanding to tend to your plants. It’s reminding yourself, as you get closer to Christmas, that you have bought enough and the last scramble to fill stockings and please those around you is, in fact, a figment of your ideals and not at all necessary. It’s buying your food in bulk to reduce your plastic consumption but then finding yourself with packets of two-minute noodles in your cupboard because, all of a sudden, you’re the parent of a teenager and that is a hunger no amount of meal planning can satiate. At the crux of simple living is the intention to live authentically and embrace the failures and successes of it all. Simple living is like a ramshackle garden: it ebbs and flows with the demands of life and its seasons, ordered and bountiful at times, a wild, uncontrollable meadow at others.
Living with less changed my life because it proved to me that there’s an undeniable freedom in living unencumbered by the things I own. There is also time and energy and creative thinking space when I don’t shop or hunt down or work to pay for the things I don’t need. And when I do peruse and buy in a bookshop or finally buy the woollen knit I’ve been saving for, I wholly revel in the opportunity to purchase something beautiful and practical that I love and know I’ll cherish and will take the time and energy to mend when, in years to come, I snag an elbow on a fence post or a tree branch.
And that’s not to say that you can’t have the ephemeral and the impractical. Often, the most frivolous items we own are the ones that mean the most to us, like the string of bells that we have near the door of the caravan. They don’t even really jingle but we’ve hung them in every house we’ve lived in and they’re a symbol of our togetherness, of how far we’ve come. The van is also decorated with bunches of gumnuts and collections of seashells, prized rocks and mighty walking sticks. We carry these things because they’re part of our story, of where we’ve been and how it’s changed us.
Whenever I reflect on our experience on the road, I come to the conclusion that you really don’t need a lot to live well. And as I sit with this idea, there is the inevitable next question: what exactly do I need to live well? What are my non-negotiables for a good, contented life? What do I choose to cherish and what do I choose to let go of? And what I’ve realised is that it’s not necessarily ‘things’ that I need, but a detachment from them. I can find joy in a beautiful teacup, a skirt with pockets and a bookshelf full of novels, but a good, contented life does not stem from belongings. It comes from freedom from them.
These are questions you can ask yourself, too. They don’t need to be answered right away. In fact, they’re the kind of questions that you’ll find yourself mulling over, wondering what if and maybe, considering in moments of contemplation when you’re faced with a mountain of dishes, the bright lights of a busy shopping centre, or the dread of yet another week of rushing backward and forward while trying to catch your breath.
What are you willing to sacrifice for time—in nature, in thinking space, with those you love? Because if life really is uncertain, then all we have is now, this very moment—time. And if we don’t value it and cherish it and use it wisely, in ways that fill our heart and soul, making memories that we’ll reflect on—of love and beauty and courage and awe—then what are we doing?
As with all aspects of simple, slow living, it is layered and evolving and there is no step-by-step guide that will see you living with less in a quick and efficient fashion. Indeed, this isn’t about a quick fix but about choices that are considered and informed and ongoing: the ones that will inevitably become new perspectives and attitudes, that take time and patience and practice to form and take hold.
Simplicity does require energy and awareness, as does sustainable, ethical, waste-free, frugal living. You have to constantly check yourself, observe your spending habits, consider the implications of your purchases and figure out the best way to stretch the leftovers in the fridge. Of course, there are times and seasons when the complexity of life is both confronting and challenging, and you realise that the simplest thing you can do is surrender to the ease of convenience for weeks and maybe months. Because regardless of how much you care about the earth, how passionate you are about using less plastic and buying local, sometimes it’s just about doing what you have to do to protect your wellbeing. Living with less, in these instances, means less rules and expectations and surrendering to the ease of convenience, a kind and compassionate simplicity that feels achievable.
It’s in these hard times, and also the good ones, that surrounding yourself with like-minded people can bolster your own simple-living journey. On our second Christmas Day in Tasmania, when we were still living and travelling in the van, we gathered with new friends, all of whom had migrated from the mainland. And as I stood in the kitchen, washing dishes while meals were prepared and, later, separating the compost scraps from the meat remnants, we started talking about whether to throw the meat in the rubbish bin or send it home with one of the guests who lived in an area where the council provides a FOGO (Food Organics and Garden Organics) bin collection on a fortnightly rotation (and a significantly smaller general rubbish bin to deter households from lumping all their waste into it). Granted, it was Christmas Day and there were seventeen of us full from a decadent lunch, a few of us busy preparing desserts, kids running excitedly through the house and into the garden, lots of chatter and cheer. There were a lot of leftovers carefully packed away to be used later and, understandably, a lot of scraps. But if it doesn’t matter in these instances, when the food and the scraps are in abundance, and there are many hands to help, then when does it matter? And while you may be thinking that it’s perhaps a little strange to be buoyed by such a conversation and to feel a sense of belonging over kitchen scraps, I understand. But this is the stuff that matters, these are the things that unite us and there is a beautiful contentment in finding people who are passionate about the same things that you are.
In his book The Art of Belonging, Hugh Mackay says, ‘It’s not where you live, it’s how you live.’ Indeed, discover what makes you happy, do the things that feel good and right, talk about them—in the grocery store, with your friends, to your neighbours—and, chances are, you’ll find like-minded folk close by, on a similar path, willing to teach, listen and share. As particularly social creatures, we are hardwired to seek a sense of belonging; it is, in fact, one of our primary needs. And whether we find it online or in our neighbourhood, connecting over books we love or food we grow (and later compost), finding your community and learning from it is a really powerful step forward. Yes, simplicity is something you can practise in solitude, but investing your time and energy in the collective good really bolsters your lived experience and propels you to stay the meaningful course you’ve chosen for yourself. This is the path of change, and while it may start with you asking questions and making decisions based on how you want to live in the world, it’s the ripples that are really effective. Living with less is a wonderful way to live, but sharing the journey with others does sweeten the experience.
