The whole reason I've dredged up this business of going a year without is that I'm trying to make some resolutions. I want to think about what would be good to do without this year. Am I ready to takle the things that are really hard for me? Am I ready to make meaningful changes?
I think I am--but I have to think about it for one more day.
Showing posts with label A Year Without. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Year Without. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
A Year Without: Volume 3 "IKEA Comes to Town"
A sore test--IKEA. I don't know when my love affair with IKEA began. It is not an uncommon love--many of my friends have it and most students do too. You'd think by the time I was 40 that I would have outgrown it, but not me. So there I was three months into "A Year Without" and it opens. The first store in Utah. I had not planned well. Why didn't I start this crazy test in June or better yet next year.
I love the clever furniture, the affordable dishware, the spare decor and the wonderfully exciting and sometimes challenging Scandinavian minimalism. Okay--this is all a high falluting way of saying I love all the style for the cheap prices. It was always so easy to justify shopping there, almost a duty, with all those great bargains. Every vacation to California I felt very justified in filling the back of the car with IKEA must haves.
I watched the news, saw the people waiting in line, sleeping out two nights to have the privileges of being the first in the new store. I never understood sleeping on the sidewalk waiting for the new Star Wars movie, but waiting for the new IKEA this I understood. I kept trying to figure out a scenario where I would just go and window shop, but really I knew that I just had to stay away. I did it until Feb 17, 2007--my next birthday and on that day I went and ended "A Year Without' at IKEA. I bought a whole new set of dishes and several different types of drinking glasses. It was fantastic!
To be continued--...
I love the clever furniture, the affordable dishware, the spare decor and the wonderfully exciting and sometimes challenging Scandinavian minimalism. Okay--this is all a high falluting way of saying I love all the style for the cheap prices. It was always so easy to justify shopping there, almost a duty, with all those great bargains. Every vacation to California I felt very justified in filling the back of the car with IKEA must haves.
I watched the news, saw the people waiting in line, sleeping out two nights to have the privileges of being the first in the new store. I never understood sleeping on the sidewalk waiting for the new Star Wars movie, but waiting for the new IKEA this I understood. I kept trying to figure out a scenario where I would just go and window shop, but really I knew that I just had to stay away. I did it until Feb 17, 2007--my next birthday and on that day I went and ended "A Year Without' at IKEA. I bought a whole new set of dishes and several different types of drinking glasses. It was fantastic!
To be continued--...
Thursday, December 25, 2008
A Year Without: Volume 2, "The First Three Months"
After not biting my nails for two weeks I was ready to take on the world. So on February 17, 2006 I decided to do something much more grand. I decided that I was not going to buy anything for me or my house for one year. I made up rules, first I could replace things if they wore out and I had nothing similar. For example, if all my jeans wore out then I could buy one pair, if a water heater went out I could replace that. I could also buy necessities like shampoo and replacement cosmetics, but not fancy things like scented lotions or perfumes. I could also still buy things for my children or my husband, they were not part of the deal--but I could not transfer my materialistic urges to them.
Why did I take on this task, you may or may not have asked. I'm not a particularly big spender. I didn't have oodles of cash around that I was wasting. It's just that I was tired of feeling a little desperate every time I went to Target or Smith's Marketplace. I was sure that if I found just the right white, grey or black t-shirt or just the right pair of pants that I would feel great about myself. I had a closet full of basic clothes and I kept buying more. I had an epiphany (one that I should have had long before that moment and one that I'm sure most of you don't even need to have)--maybe it wasn't clothes I needed to feel good about myself--maybe I just needed to stop and think.
At first it was such a relief. I could go and get groceries and not feel compelled to look at the clothes. I knew they were off limits. It was wonderful. I felt so superior. One month later I'm faced with an incredible temptation. I stained my favorite deep purple dress shirt--a grease stain that I could not get out. This was a necessity. I justified and hemmed and hawed, but I knew it was not part of the deal. I had other dress shirts. I had to either get it clean or do without. I treated it and washed it with every load of darks and finally after about 10 loads it came clean. I cannot tell you the utter rapture I had wearing that shirt. I had been living in an environment where I would have considered that shirt disposable--what a waste. (I wore that shirt Christmas Eve 2008 and I still loved it.)
Our society has considered so many things disposable. Take computers in and you will be told that it is just cheaper to get a new one. Rip a hole in your pants, you don’t mend it with a patch, you buy a new pair—I seldom see anyone with obviously repaired clothing nowadays, but when I was little I remember wearing flower patches, sun patches or just the good old ubiquitous blue rectangle patch.
During this time I was movie "Bleak House" on PBS, the young heroine received flowers and she immediately pressed some in her book, then gazed on them tenderly from time to time. I loved that. Because she had so little, she really prized what she had. Often I think we can just replace things, even something sentimental. Nothing is precious--or everything is too precious and we feel desperate for more of it.
Two years later it all seems a little silly in time of recession. Willingly giving up things, things considered luxuries to the rest of the world, is much different than being unable to pay for housing or food. I hope I understand that--but putting conscious space between myself and materialism changed the way I acted. I hope it changed it forever.
To be continued, "IKEA Comes to Town"
Why did I take on this task, you may or may not have asked. I'm not a particularly big spender. I didn't have oodles of cash around that I was wasting. It's just that I was tired of feeling a little desperate every time I went to Target or Smith's Marketplace. I was sure that if I found just the right white, grey or black t-shirt or just the right pair of pants that I would feel great about myself. I had a closet full of basic clothes and I kept buying more. I had an epiphany (one that I should have had long before that moment and one that I'm sure most of you don't even need to have)--maybe it wasn't clothes I needed to feel good about myself--maybe I just needed to stop and think.
At first it was such a relief. I could go and get groceries and not feel compelled to look at the clothes. I knew they were off limits. It was wonderful. I felt so superior. One month later I'm faced with an incredible temptation. I stained my favorite deep purple dress shirt--a grease stain that I could not get out. This was a necessity. I justified and hemmed and hawed, but I knew it was not part of the deal. I had other dress shirts. I had to either get it clean or do without. I treated it and washed it with every load of darks and finally after about 10 loads it came clean. I cannot tell you the utter rapture I had wearing that shirt. I had been living in an environment where I would have considered that shirt disposable--what a waste. (I wore that shirt Christmas Eve 2008 and I still loved it.)
Our society has considered so many things disposable. Take computers in and you will be told that it is just cheaper to get a new one. Rip a hole in your pants, you don’t mend it with a patch, you buy a new pair—I seldom see anyone with obviously repaired clothing nowadays, but when I was little I remember wearing flower patches, sun patches or just the good old ubiquitous blue rectangle patch.
During this time I was movie "Bleak House" on PBS, the young heroine received flowers and she immediately pressed some in her book, then gazed on them tenderly from time to time. I loved that. Because she had so little, she really prized what she had. Often I think we can just replace things, even something sentimental. Nothing is precious--or everything is too precious and we feel desperate for more of it.
Two years later it all seems a little silly in time of recession. Willingly giving up things, things considered luxuries to the rest of the world, is much different than being unable to pay for housing or food. I hope I understand that--but putting conscious space between myself and materialism changed the way I acted. I hope it changed it forever.
To be continued, "IKEA Comes to Town"
Saturday, December 20, 2008
A Year Without
Two years ago I was feeling a little drastic--not unlike today or many other ordinary days. I think life is made to force you to the edge and at least peer over. Well, here is where I was. . .
February 2007,
I have some ideas about what this means and where it all began. Was it a gap in my understanding of God for the first time in my life. Where I came to doubt my own relevance, my own ability to decipher the will of God for myself my basic self. When suddenly I was cast alone upon the blind waves of the universe and found myself trying to fight my way back upon solid ground. I took for granted the solid ground, took for granted that I thought it was my lot never to stand on the cliffs of the gates of hell and look in and wondering if it just wouldn’t be better to fall in. My turn to have doubt. Then slip into the fathomless depth of not exactly self pity, but it’s kin self-deception. That somehow consequences do not stalk actions. That inactivity, isolation and denial don't breed death. A death ugly with fat cells and a numb brain drowned by an abundance of unearned riches.
Now if that first paragraph of self-indulgent rot didn’t make you shut off your Internet, nothing will.
I needed a victory. Not something grand, just something I could achieve. Now let me describe how I hoped the small act of stopping myself from biting my fingernails for one year would bring me back from the afore mentioned brink. Brink of what I'm not sure.
The beginning of a year without. . .
It all started on my fortieth birthday. A forty year old who still bit her fingernails. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t. If it gives you any idea about my need for self comfort I sucked my thumb until I was 8. (Only in private--I at least understood some social taboos) I only desisted at that time, because my bishop, who was also my dentist, told me that I would not be baptized unless I stopped biting my fingernails and to add extra pressure he also said that he would put tubes on my arms over my elbows so that I would not be able to bend them and put the offending thumbs into my mouth. Tragic. Of course I stopped, I have a secret though, I think it must have been that day that I began biting my nails.
I now make my disclaimer. Biting nails is not a bad thing. It hurts no one, and may greatly alleviate stress etc. It is good for cellists, violinists and many other musicians who must keep their fingertips free of the stain of excess--what is that stuff that’s in jello--collagen? They are saved from that clicky sound nails make on the instrument and nothing distracts from the purity of notes unhindered by vanity.
With that stated, know that I do not judge you biters and find you superior in you ability to avoid social pressure. Pressure that at forty I felt impossible to ignore. I live in a neighborhood that I have come to call the land of the unearthly beautiful, and I have come to believe that it is time to concede one point. I say it to myself quietly, so as not to disturb my sense of superiority at being above all this—I want to have pretty hands. I want to put my arm around my husband, child, or just rest it on the bench at church and NOT curl up the tips to hide the nail. I don’t have to have a manicure, polish or acrylic tips, I just want them socially acceptable. So, at forty I pulled out an old bottle of the putrescent stuff that is painted on nails daily to make them so disagreeable to taste buds that I will actually notice that fingers are in my mouth. It was all the reminder I needed.
I know it sounds weird but that was what bothered me the most on my fortieth birthday, even though I also happened to be many pounds overweight, an unfinished book in my desk, a house that was slowly being inundated by cobwebs, dust and dirty clothes. There you have it. Here began my year without.
To be continued. . .
February 2007,
I have some ideas about what this means and where it all began. Was it a gap in my understanding of God for the first time in my life. Where I came to doubt my own relevance, my own ability to decipher the will of God for myself my basic self. When suddenly I was cast alone upon the blind waves of the universe and found myself trying to fight my way back upon solid ground. I took for granted the solid ground, took for granted that I thought it was my lot never to stand on the cliffs of the gates of hell and look in and wondering if it just wouldn’t be better to fall in. My turn to have doubt. Then slip into the fathomless depth of not exactly self pity, but it’s kin self-deception. That somehow consequences do not stalk actions. That inactivity, isolation and denial don't breed death. A death ugly with fat cells and a numb brain drowned by an abundance of unearned riches.
Now if that first paragraph of self-indulgent rot didn’t make you shut off your Internet, nothing will.
I needed a victory. Not something grand, just something I could achieve. Now let me describe how I hoped the small act of stopping myself from biting my fingernails for one year would bring me back from the afore mentioned brink. Brink of what I'm not sure.
The beginning of a year without. . .
It all started on my fortieth birthday. A forty year old who still bit her fingernails. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t. If it gives you any idea about my need for self comfort I sucked my thumb until I was 8. (Only in private--I at least understood some social taboos) I only desisted at that time, because my bishop, who was also my dentist, told me that I would not be baptized unless I stopped biting my fingernails and to add extra pressure he also said that he would put tubes on my arms over my elbows so that I would not be able to bend them and put the offending thumbs into my mouth. Tragic. Of course I stopped, I have a secret though, I think it must have been that day that I began biting my nails.
I now make my disclaimer. Biting nails is not a bad thing. It hurts no one, and may greatly alleviate stress etc. It is good for cellists, violinists and many other musicians who must keep their fingertips free of the stain of excess--what is that stuff that’s in jello--collagen? They are saved from that clicky sound nails make on the instrument and nothing distracts from the purity of notes unhindered by vanity.
With that stated, know that I do not judge you biters and find you superior in you ability to avoid social pressure. Pressure that at forty I felt impossible to ignore. I live in a neighborhood that I have come to call the land of the unearthly beautiful, and I have come to believe that it is time to concede one point. I say it to myself quietly, so as not to disturb my sense of superiority at being above all this—I want to have pretty hands. I want to put my arm around my husband, child, or just rest it on the bench at church and NOT curl up the tips to hide the nail. I don’t have to have a manicure, polish or acrylic tips, I just want them socially acceptable. So, at forty I pulled out an old bottle of the putrescent stuff that is painted on nails daily to make them so disagreeable to taste buds that I will actually notice that fingers are in my mouth. It was all the reminder I needed.
I know it sounds weird but that was what bothered me the most on my fortieth birthday, even though I also happened to be many pounds overweight, an unfinished book in my desk, a house that was slowly being inundated by cobwebs, dust and dirty clothes. There you have it. Here began my year without.
To be continued. . .
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