Filed under: Confidence, Inspiration, Life, Mindful Living, Personal Connections, Simplify
In revisiting my simplicity reading, I’ve been inspired to suggest a movement. We’ve all heard the saying “keeping up with the Joneses” and we are all well aware of the trouble it has caused our society with unbelievable debt. My suggestion is a movement about “Keeping Up With The ‘OTHER’ Joneses.”
The Joneses I would like to compare notes with are the ones who believe in making deliberate choices and living a mindful life. Maybe this is what they “look” like:
- Making simple life choices in order to spend their money on what really means something to them.
- Having less debt because of their desire to live a life with a focus on personal connections with their loved ones rather than having to work as much as possible to try and keep ahead of their payments.
- The ones who move through life with confidence that they know exactly what they are working for and towards because they have spent the time with their own thoughts to figure it all out.
With our money woes playing such a large role in what our life ends up looking like, it is a basic starting point for simplifying our lives - to focus our energies on how we are spending our hard earned money. Anyone who is familiar with the idea of simplicity knows that it doesn’t mean depriving yourself of the things that you truly enjoy in life. Rather it means taking a very close look at what your goals are in this area of your life and making sure you are making it happen. You can say that one of your goals is to retire at the age of 55 however if you do not take the steps to make that happen, it won’t. Often times just wishing for something doesn’t make it happen …. there must be, at least, a little effort behind it.
I believe that if we each sat down and wrote down some basic thoughts about where we want life to take us and what we would like to achieve with the money we make throughout our lives, it will naturally make almost every other aspect of our lives more clear. I’m not suggesting that every person’s goal should be early retirement or even that their goal should be to live a debt-free life. What I am suggesting is that each person becomes aware of what their goals are and deliberately chooses what their life will look like. If nothing else, it will offer us peace of mind that what we are doing at the moment is perfectly aligned with our goals. Who doesn’t enjoy some peace of mind?
Filed under: Gratitude, Inspiration, Mindful Living, Personal Connections, Simplify
With this day and age of excess, I love the following list of ideas to teach our children how to simplify … just follow the link here.
http://www.onlineorganizing.com/NewslettersArticle.asp?newsletter=go&article=794
I have long encouraged people to give my children “experience” gifts rather than more things and it surprises me how difficult that seems to be for people. It is almost as if they don’t think it is a true gift unless there is something they can unwrap, play with for approximately 3 days and then discard in the tub with all the other things. Of course, there is the chance that a few months from now they will rediscover it and play with it for a few more days I love the idea of having the memories of fun times with people we love rather than another piece of plastic to eventually end up in a landfill.
My hope is that, with a little direction, the experience gifts are ones my children will request on their own as time goes on. I can picture them sitting and thinking about how much fun it will be to go to the “paint your own pottery” place with Aunt Angie and then reliving it each time they look at that clay spider they picked out. Sure it leaves them with bringing another “thing” home however this one has a personal connection tied to it. Personal connections make our lives much richer, fill us with gratitude and inspire us to keep others close to our hearts.
