Tag: #Challenge2019

The Big Bad Maybe Later

Simply MessyLeave a comment

This will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody: I am rather inept at saying no. Slightly more unusually maybe – or at least, slightly less talked about – is being equally bad at saying yes.

So how do you go through life saying neither no nor yes? By becoming a master of the unholy trinity: We’ll See, Maybe Later, and I’ll See What I Can Do. Used effectively, they will answer any situation known to humanity, and are as useful in a classroom as they are in any number of parenting conundrums. In fact, The Paleontologist has started predicting my response, and has changed her questioning technique, asking open questions whenever possible: “Why can’t we have bubblegum ice cream?” is a frequent opening gambit. Other favourites include “When are you going to let me have a phone?” and the wonderful “Why does our Tooth Fairy give less money than the Fairy that goes to [insert the name of absolutely any other classmate]?” The Cowgirl, predictably, approaches things totally differently, dodging asking questions altogether by doing things she thinks she won’t be allowed to do as secretly as possible. Thankfully, subtlety is not as much her forte as, say, running headlong through any obstacle, from rose bushes to recalcitrant authority figures. The time she ate a whole pack of chocolate coins, hiding the wrappers in her pillowcase so that I didn’t see them in the bin, showed particular insight and forward planning. At least, it did until she asked me to plump up her pillow the next evening. Oops.

So I have one child who has developed excellent open questioning techniques, and another who has mastered the art of independence before mastering her 3 times table. This is good, right? Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy noncommittal… Except, of course, we all know there is. And not just the kind of wrong that leads to my more decisive friends and relations (looking in no particular direction, but we both know who you are!) wanting to throw me out of the nearest window fifteen times on any given day. Avoiding both yes and no is a great way of dodging most forms of conflict: if no one (including me, particularly in busy times, or September, or first thing in the morning) knows what I want, they certainly can’t get in a grump if I disagree with them. But it has a deep darkness as a cost. It also means avoiding contentment within myself. Saying yes means saying this is good; saying I’m happy with this; saying this is enough.

There is often a feeling that living a more sustainable life means saying no. You say no to flying and take your chances on holidaying in the UK – may be amazing, may be the end of your marriage and feel like December. You say no to plastic and no to frappacinos, to deodorants bought in your lunch break because you forgot to put any on this morning, to sanitary towels, to the basic fundamentals of everyday living. You say no to meat, to cheese, to takeaways, to many of the things that make busy lives both enjoyable and achievable. You say no to all the things other people are doing, heart pounding as you say it – will they think you’re judging them? Are you judging them?

What if, instead of saying no, simple living was all about saying yes? It would change my perception of it dramatically if I could navigate that mindshift. Here’s an example of when I’ve tried. A few days ago, I went on a train journey to the very North of Scotland – and, as if 7 hours on a train (plus delays, of course) wasn’t enough, three days later we came back again. I was, obviously, not optimistic about the whole experience. Two children, one tablet, tired Mum, Dad away with work; what could possibly go right? But then came the magic. The first bit of magic was my previously-mentioned saintly mother saying yes to buying magazines for both children. Hooray for plastic toys! Hooray for Ninjago mini-figures! (That’s Lego, if you’re not up to speed with the latest lingo the kids are using.) Hooray for activities, and quizzes, and facts that keep science-crazy munchkins engaged for… well, actually for hours. We also had activity books, Top Trumps (cathedrals in one pack, dinosaurs in the other – only in my family…) and an ancient game of Master Mind that involves breaking a code set by the other player. And with that, we survived. We not only survived, we thrived. Both Mum and I managed to spend time reading; in fact, I stopped when I was ready, not before. I genuinely can’t remember when that last happened. It turns out that saying yes to what is directly in front of you, being present and answering questions, reading instructions, then letting the instructions be followed without interference (even when they Do It Wrong), works terribly well, something I used to know, but had let myself forget.

View from a train window, looking out over a very wide river. In the bottom corner is the reflection of a child playing on a tablet.
The beauty of the Scottish coastline. The wonder of a happy child who hasn’t run anywhere for several hours.

Sometimes, I say we’ll see because I don’t know how to even conceive of having the energy to do what is asked (particularly when I’m being asked to build a working robot out of toilet roll wrappers, to take just one example…) And at other times, I say we’ll see because I mean no. Just no. In fact, I frequently mean I’d rather do the school run across hot coals than even think about doing what is asked. (Building a robot isn’t that bad. A whole afternoon of joining in with watching Peppa Pig is.) So I’m setting myself a slightly late #ChallengeAugust. To say no when I mean it; to say yes when I want it; to say we’ll see when I genuinely mean I don’t know yet whether it’s yes or no. Well, apart from when discussing birthday parties. With four months to go until the closest one, any resolution needs a touch of realism and some hard-won messy survival techniques, naturally.

A long bridge curves across a wide estuary, big enough to almost look like the sea.
The rail bridge approaching Dundee. An utterly stunning sweep of countryside.

Everything is connected

Simply MessyLeave a comment

One of my all-time favourite films is V For Vendetta. Apart from the obvious moments (after all, right now, is there anyone who would object to Westminster being blown sky high, particularly if empty at the time…) one scene that really resonates is a montage where investigator Eric Finch says “I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It’s like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events… It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realised we’re all part of it, and all trapped by it.” His companion, of course, asks if that meant he knew what would happen next, and with typical bluntness gets the response “No, it was a feeling. But I can guess…” And tragedy plays out, giving the film the chance to leave those horrors in maybe-land: did they happen? Did they not? Can the girl with glasses be saved?

“V for Vendetta” by Marko Manev is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

We live in a time when every problem is treated as though it stands alone, and every individual is trained to see themselves as an island, with, if they are lucky, causeways connecting them to others, appearing and disappearing with the tides, with never a hint of where the mainland might be found. If you are ill, you get tablets. Tablets for blood pressure; for cholesterol; for headaches; for coughs, colds and not being quite at your best; for anxiety; for depression. Tablets for each individual symptom, as though all of these things are somehow caused separately, interacting independently with the body they have found a home in. Sorting out your work-life balance is a task for every individual, who is then held personally to blame if we get lost in the middle of a perfect storm of demands and expectations and can’t do it by ourselves. Saving the world means cutting your personal carbon footprint, giving up plastic around the home, individual action and sacrifice. The question is always: what are you doing? You as an individual; a family household; maybe, at best, as a town.

Seeing individuals as worthy of value and respect, with God dwelling within them, whatever they have done or thought, however they look and regardless of the capacity for good or evil weighing down their actions, is a gift and a curse and a thing we should all be aiming for. Seeing the individual as the height of all our ambitions, personal glory over a community rising together, has caused lives to fall apart, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the desperate, and Boris Johnson moving into number 10. How much further does this road have left before it splits into so many individual footpaths, some smooth and wide, some rocky and overgrown with nettles, but all leading inexorably into the wilderness of isolation, getting further and further apart, until we can no longer see, smell, hear, any other living things around us?

Talking to students has made me realise how unhealthy expectations in this country can be. One told me that she works so hard that she buys clothes and doesn’t have the time or the energy to wear them. They lie in the bags they came in at the bottom of the wardrobe until, packing for an extended journey home, they resurface, bringing with them the hope they first entered the home with; hope that will now be enjoyed elsewhere, because there is no time for it here. It is so different, she said, in the country she was born in. People there value and enjoy their possessions, their friends, their time. For someone who barely has the energy to brush her teeth at the end of some days, I confess, that sounds like an idyll beyond price.

How have we come to value ourselves and each other so little? Why do we value money so much more than time? During my first year as a teacher, I got used to a day that left the house running for school at 8am and didn’t finish until the next day’s lessons were just about thrown together, usually at about 11pm. I put up with the hours, the expectations, the lack of any life outside the walls I had prepared for myself. I boasted about how bad it was, as we outdid each other with stress levels and caffeine intake around the staff room kettle. But why? The expectation is that in order to have a job with meaning, with satisfaction, that changes things, however small, you put up with what is thrown at you. And acting alone, my choices are suck it up or sack it off, give up, do something else. But what if we all stood together? Not just my union (though we are working on that one); not just those working in the public services; all of us, walking together saying we, and our lives, and the planet are all worth more than mindless, individual busyness?

More time means more ability to slow down, to make from scratch, to take care and do, buy, say the right thing, not the easy thing. To have a sense of achievement from that. To tell someone else about it, and work together so that they can do it too. More life in that notorious balance means more opportunities for joy. And more joy means less greed; less need for eternal, all-consuming growth; more options.

Living within our means is a phrase that has been used for the good, the bad, and the blatantly discriminatory within society over the last decade or so. But when it is used, it is always used to talk about living within our financial means. What would it be like to live within all our means? To live lives where we use the time, the emotion, the energy we have to live our best lives; where nothing is asked of us that we cannot freely give? What would it be like to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and know that we are enough?

It is the summer holidays: traditionally the point that teachers look at their lives and try and sort out all their problems at once, now that they suddenly have space to breathe. I find myself looking at the chaos I create around myself and wondering what we would have to do as a family to live within our time-means. What would we as a country have to change in order to do the same?

Challenge 2019: we’re halfway there (on a wing and a prayer)

Simply MessyLeave a comment

I know I say this every year, but seriously, how is it July already? As ever, time is not merely marching on but racing by, blue lights flashing and siren fading into the distance as it leaves us all on the pavement, gawking after it and wondering what it will find when it gets to wherever it is headed. However, as it is undeniably July, and even the weather has now caught up with the general principle that it’s time to grow up and act appropriately, I thought I would take this opportunity to glance into an under-used side room and dust off my Not-a-New-Year-Resolution. The beating heart of this collection of Things to Try and See If They Work is the intention of testing out in real life ways to live more sustainably; to shift the focus of what we as a family are doing away from excessive consumption or environmental fire fighting, and into a way of living a happy, meaningful, love-driven life that makes the most of what we have, allows us to have what we need, and helps in however small a way to show that life is about so much more than consumerism and out-living our mental, emotional and physical means. Good thing I didn’t aim for anything difficult, really, isn’t it…!

As was almost entirely predictable, my goals started off well and dwindled into dust around Easter time:

  • Challenge January: Not buying anything non-essential. Doing this for a month did make me more aware of what I buy, particularly the impulse buys. Do I still love buying new things? Yes, I really do. The change that has stuck is that I have rediscovered the joys of charity shops and used items on eBay, at least reducing the impact of making new clothes in the first place. Halfway there it is…
  • Challenge February: Gentle decluttering in a big way. So the tidying up happened. I’m not about to say that it spread to the rest of the house, or anything absurd like that, but at least some of the bigger improvements made that month are still just about noticeable now. It also helped me to consider which of the many things that I keep out of habit I actually need or actually like, what might be useful in future, and what would be better finding a new home where it has a chance of being loved; or, failing that, at least getting out of this home where it will never be more than a burden.
  • Challenge March: Fixing everything uncovered in the process of Challenge February. There have been some good successes here. A couple of skirts, some bags and coats, and several bras are all on the list of things that are no longer abandoned in a mending pile, out of sight and mind and will. Excitingly, this mindset of just do it has sneaked into everyday life: I found myself grabbing a needle before the school run a few days ago, quite happy to do an emergency button refastening then and there. Unfortunately, we are breaking/tearing/growing out of clothes so quickly, the reducing the mending pile goal itself hasn’t actually happened at all.

Then we sank into the depths of Lent. Challenge April existed only in my head, and May and June didn’t even make it that far. There is an unavoidable lesson there. Writing a promise down, making it public, having witnesses: these are things that help us to stick to the commitments we have made. Marriage, manifestos, Slimming World – part of the thing they all have in common is the idea of asking people we care about to hold us to our best intentions. Or at least, they should do, and we should be taking up that responsibility. Maybe that’s where politics has been going so wrong recently? But that’s a rant for a different post…

Challenge July certainly needs to be written down, then. It’s time to get back on the horse. To learn from what I’ve done so far and find ways to keep getting better. So here is my plan. This month, I am going to challenge myself to create a warm, welcoming, organised and functional hallway. No longer will it be a dumping ground of bags, shoes, gloves, sunglasses, drawings, takeaway menus (bless them, do they not realise we always use Just Eat anyway?), musical instruments, wellies, pipe cleaners, clerical collars… We are all guilty of coming in and crashing at once, layers and bags and lunch boxes falling behind us like a trail of crumbs, showing every step we have taken until we are found flat out on the sofa watching other people being energetic on iPlayer.

Given the level of chaos routinely to be found in our hallway, deciding to tackle it in itself is quite an undertaking. But it’s July, which means I’m not teaching much, and so I am reaching beyond the sensible, the brave, the wise, and finding myself halfway between the sublime and the ridiculous. I am going to do my level best to create that homely, warm, inviting and functional hallway space without buying anything. At all. Everything will be repurposed or upcycled from things already in the house. Pinterest, of course, is full of ideas to start with (though I’d be very happy to hear others too!) I’m thinking smashed up CDs, cloth-covered cardboard boxes, and wall hangings made from discarded jeans, and that’s just for starters. Who knows where this will end?

So far, I have emptied a few of the bags that have been lining the stairs for a little while now. (By little while, I mean that I found an old-style £1 coin in the bottom of one of them.) I have made plans and schemes and got excitable. I have worked out that using things from around the house frees two birds with one key, reducing the clutter around the rest of the building and also creating a more happy space in part of it. On paper, it’s all good. What happens when that paper is glued onto an old pizza box and turned into storage for sunglasses, plastic giveaways and treasured works of love and glitter is yet to be seen.

A tower of Very Important Things that need to be sorted including papers, bags for life and PE kits. Next to them is the mountain of things that I happen to have lying around my house anyway that I can use to create a more enjoyable space. And I thought there would never be any advantages to being a hoarder…

Waste not; want a lot

Simply Messy2 Comments

I have just come back from a little time at the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. It’s hard to explain what this means to people who have never experienced it, but here’s my current best attempt. Over 1000 Quakers from all over Britain (and a fair few visitors from all over the world) gather in one building in central London for 3 days, and worship and work together to discern where we are at the moment, and where God needs us to be, in ourselves, our community, and the world. It is the very definition of organised chaos – there are never going to be enough toilets for that number of people to use in a 20 minute session break – with a lot of hugging (not a fan) and a lot of gin (bit too much of a fan). Before this year, I would have described the group as fairly homogeneous, but I wouldn’t do that now. Although it is not yet close to being the embodiment of diversity in action that we would like it to be, I think as a Society we will be healthier, happier and able to welcome others more sincerely if we continue and deepen the work done so far, speaking as clearly about how we are already different as we do about how we are the same.

“Quakers Meeting” by Thomas Rowlandson is licensed under CC CC0 1.0

As part of a wider exploration of Privilege and Power, we were also thinking about sustainability in the face of the climate emergency. The words currently ringing through my mind, pushing me out of my comfort zone in all the right ways, are “I need to do everything I can do. Then I need to do a little bit more.” But I don’t want to do a little bit more. I feel like a lot of the time I’m at breaking point already. How can I do more?

But, of course, I can. No, it won’t be easy, or I would have done it before. But as the same speaker said, I can’t look my children in the eye and say, in 30 years time, that I’m sorry I didn’t love them enough to leave them a world they can enjoy with their own children, in the way I can enjoy this world with mine. How can I deprive them of sharing the thrill of rolling headlong down hills covered in wildflowers (and plenty of things we all pretend are not hiding under the grasses); of counting the spots on ladybirds; of always knowing there will be enough food in the cupboards to keep them safe from hunger (even when half a loaf of bread has once more gone fluffy in the bread bin)?

So I need to do more. What can I do? How am I being called to change my life, and through that, help to make being more sustainable part of the collective default?

A phrase that I always associate with my grandmother (who was born into extreme poverty, lived in London through both World Wars and lost her parents-in-law to the Blitz) is “waste not, want not”. She also loved “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” In my head, whenever I hear that, I hear it in my own mother’s voice, with that slightly horrified tone of “did I just turn into my mother?” When I say it (and I do), I would imagine I say it with exactly the same inflection…

Waste not, want not. It has a visceral memory of rationing running clear through it. And it is in direct opposition to most of the way that things are made and marketed in modern society. But what does it mean to me?

The main areas of unquestionable waste in my daily habits are buying clothes I do not need, and eating too much. And in both of these areas, saying no to wasteful habits means saying no to things that I really, really want, if only in that moment. Saying no to consuming more than I need, more than is healthy, more than is right, is saying no to waste. It is also saying that I have to learn to resist the yearning that floods through me for that moment of indulgence and zoning out when tucking into a doughnut or three in the gasp between lessons; or the siren call of inhabiting that body and luxuriating in that lifestyle slithering its way into my subconscious as I dash into town for pens or the chemist.

I am a firm lover of lists and making plans (and usually slightly weaker at actually actioning those plans), and so I have been thinking about how I can create ways around me of reducing waste, and in particular, of stopping throwing away so much spoiled food, and eating so much food that I really don’t need – ways that are sustainable long term, by not adding straws to our already-creaking camels’ backs. I started this year intending to do something different and sustainable every month, a lifestyle change I called #Challenge2019. This (admittedly quite overdue now) is its next installment. So here we go.

I have said before that food waste in our household happens for a number of reasons. I buy healthy food and then don’t have the energy to cook it, so it goes off. (I’m not talking about going past its sell by date here, incidentally – I’m talking liquid cucumbers and green yogurt). I buy chocolate and crisps as occasional treats, and we all end up eating them as the satsumas go hard and brown in the fruit bowl. I cook what feels like the right amount of food, and put too much on our plates, so that we all end up either throwing some away (The Paleontologist) or eating until our tummies hurt (both The Cowgirl and me). I come home from work or days out, full of good intentions, and then snack on cheese because I need a quick boost and everything else takes effort. Then I put too much food on my plate when tea is finally ready and the cycle continues.

Working on all these things at once is impossible for me. Trust me – I’ve tried it I don’t know how many times, and it has never worked. Small changes, embedded one by one and built on slowly, is the only way I can see this working. This week, we’re looking at 5 a day. As a family, our challenge is to eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a day. If we do, we each get to put a cork (reused, of course 😉) into a pot. When there are a full week’s corks in there, we get a family treat.

How does this help sustainability, I hear you ask? I’m hoping, in lots of ways. It will mean snacking on the short-lived fruit and veg already in the house, instead of crisps and sweets. It will encourage me to incorporate more veg into meals, and hopefully give the girls the incentive to eat them instead of them going straight from the pan into the food waste canister. As we all get better at adding daily corks to the family total, I’m also hoping to bring in ideas about where our fruit, in particular, was grown, and how it reached us. And yes, it’s also about encouraging us all to eat more healthily, which might also help me to fit into more of my old clothes, meaning I don’t have to buy more when I have a whole wardrobe of clothes already that I don’t want to admit I may never be able to zip up again. Wouldn’t it be great to address both areas of waste in my life at once?

Is this going to save the world? Clearly not, with just me on my own, saying the same thing over and over to my nuclear family. Is it going to help? Yes. It will help me, but it is also a way of living my faith and my conviction, making the choices and sacrifices I can right now, helping my children and myself see I mean what I say, and that hard choices for me can look everyday and commonplace for others around me. And that’s ok. They may have their own hard decisions which I can support them with, which if we’re all lucky may be something that someone else they know has already overcome, and can show them the way around.

This is me doing everything I can, and then a little bit more. When this is normal, I will do a little bit more of the little bits more. What do you do that is a little bit more? And what can I do to help?

The dangerous business of tidying up

Simply Messy1 Comment

Someone told me, back before The Paleontologist was able to say “Argentinosaurus”, that hours with a newborn would seem endless, but years would pass in the blink of an eye. It’s a great description of parenthood; it also sums up perfectly how I have felt about February. There have been moments that felt like they stretched into millennia (OK, that might be an exaggeration, but they usually involved testing my #sugarfreeFebruary resolutions to the limit, so I feel I’m allowed a little hyperbole now and again). But now that we’re here, on the last day of the month, I suddenly realised all the things I meant to do that I haven’t done yet, and am getting weirdly nostalgic. Not nostalgic enough to continue either of my February challenges into March, obviously, but still, this is enough of an ending to make me wistfully look back over my golden initial intentions.

My #ChallengeFebruary was to sort and rehome 10 things from the midden that was my bedroom. Looking back on this process of decluttering through my current hazy gold-tinted spectacles, a few realisations have fizzled their way to the front of my mind.

  1. When a job seems impossible, start with the thing right in front of you. In my case, this meant that the first 3 days of February were spent working my way through myriad clusters of receipts and clothes tags. As the clutter started to disappear, however, I realised the solution to problems I hadn’t even realised were bugging me. Sometimes, you have to start along a path before you can see the way through the brambles. And sometimes, you have to clear away the abandoned pasta bracelets before you realise that this space will never work for jewellry and makeup, and all this time, you have needed something completely different.
  2. Routine is helpful, but so is keeping the spirit of the task in clear sight. I know that I respond well to deadlines and clearly defined tasks. Decluttering 10 things every day is easy to track, to record. That makes it something I am much more likely to stick at; but it also means that if I don’t follow the rules, because I am tired, or away, or I just forgot until way past bedtime, I end up beating myself up and missing the moments of joy caused by genuine successes.
  3. Always check under the bed before you decide a job is finished. Sometimes you can’t finish a job in the time you have. An important thing to remember when deciding whether to call it a day is that, however tempting it might be in the short term, it never saves time to hide everything under the bed. Well, unless the Bishop or all the family are staying. Then you just need to follow realisation 2, and do what you have to in order to get through…

In the process of clearing at least some of the room formally known as The Midden, my #ChallengeMarch also gradually crept into focus. I have found a huge number of half-done projects, and unmended clothes, and fraying bags. They were layered like sediment in a variety of corners; and when I dug to the lowest levels, I found clothes that felt like old friends, that I had been trying to find replacements for for years, though the replacements were never as good as the originals – isn’t that always the case? My goal for #MendItMarch, then, is to get the number of projects squirreled away low enough that they will all fit comfortably into my newly-created Projects Box. The fact that it is currently full, and there are at least two other mending piles still waiting to be dealt with, will give some idea of the size of the task ahead.

img_20190220_212636.jpg
My all new Projects Box – or as it will probably soon become know, the Box of Doom…

The reason for choosing this challenge is two-fold. One is the intention to reduce the amount of things I buy, getting old favourites back into circulation instead. This will probably be helped by my decision to only buy new/charity shop things if I have already fixed at least one thing in that category – so no new bags until I have fixed at least one of the broken ones currently cowering in the top of a cupboard 😪. It may even convince my children that the automatic response to something shattering across the kitchen floor is not “oopsie, oh well, we need to buy another plate/cup/cake stand” (delete as appropriate).

The other reason for choosing this challenge is more psychological. Many of the things in my mending pile are there not because I really think I will ever be able to fix them, but more because I once really liked them, and now they’re worn through, and I am not at all good at letting things like that go, even when the only other option is hiding them away and feeling guilty each time I notice them. So, following my realisations from February, I have recognised that sometimes you have to start the process before you can see how it will end. And sometimes, you have to try to mend something in order to be able to accept that actually, life changes, new things sometimes need space in our lives unexpectedly, and the only way to have room for everything is to let the broken things go, freeing them from their dejected and dingy hideaways.

Messy Hospitality and Gentle Decluttering: Challenge February

Simply Messy4 Comments

One of the things about living in a vicarage (or a rectory, as I keep being reminded we do now) is that your house is never completely your own. A very smart woman told me a very long time ago, when I was a new and naive clergy spouse, that it is beneficial to make sure that there is at least one room in the house that is tidy enough for visitors at any time, as you never know when someone will stop by.

The intervening years have demonstrated that she was absolutely right, and that the destitute and the Bishop are equally likely to drop by with no warning. These years have also demonstrated that, as a family, we are quite frankly useless at keeping any rooms in the house tidy. Instead, we have learned to practice Messy Hospitality. Anyone who stops by is welcomed in. We always have tea, and we sometimes have biscuits. We usually have gin and a listening ear. And we have piles of paperwork all over the surfaces, and toys all over the floor. This is our home, and it’s chaotic, and if you come in you need to accept that. To me, it’s an important way of saying that mess and chaos don’t need to be left at the door: we’re all pretty messy on the inside, and our houses (and our Facebook feeds) shouldn’t try to disguise that.

So messy hospitality is important to me. A perfectly tidy home does not feel like my home at all. Having said that, staying one step ahead of the mayhem does help me maintain calm in the midst of chaos. My downstairs usually reflects that (unless, of course, it’s a school holiday. Or Ofsted are in my college. Or one of the children is ill. Or, let’s face it, Netflix have just come out with another slightly addictive boxset.) My upstairs, however, is another matter. My bedroom, in particular, is the dumping ground for the rest of the house; all the other rooms become play dens or sleepover venues at some point, but that one is sacrosanct. It is therefore, inevitably, always the last to be tidied. It has piles of goodness knows what in every corner, some of which have been there since we moved in, and all of which are being added to daily, with clutter drifting on top of clutter. In fact, maybe that is where The Paleontologist gets her fascination with digging through layers of dross to find dinosaur treasures?

The problem, for me, with this level of clutter is that it stops my home feeling comfortable, and makes it an extension of the stresses and havoc of everyday life. When every surface has things that haven’t quite been put away, and you have to move 5 things before you can put down your morning cup of coffee, the time has come to take action. Which brings me on to the next part of my #Challenge2019: Challenge February. This month, I want to declutter 10 things every day from my bedroom. This is based on the idea that doing a little every day is more sustainable than big clear outs, and still sees solid results. It’s a principle I first came across on Facebook, created by Less Stuff. They are excellent at actually taking things out of the house and finding new purposes for old objects. In contrast, I’m afraid that when I talk about decluttering I mostly mean actually putting the recycling into the blue bin and putting away all my clothes. I’ve even doubled the amount to do each day in the hope that one month will be enough to see a real difference (yes, it is that bad). Still, the intention is there. Every day, I want to find homes for ten things that are out of place, so that by the end of the month, my bedroom is closer to an oasis of calm than the aftermath of a very localised tornado. You never know: if I get into the habit enough, I may be able to work the same magic on the study as well…

#ChallengeJanuary: What not to buy

Simply Messy1 Comment

Never mind January; it’s the end of the year that is all about new things in my household. We have 3 birthdays and an anniversary, as well as Christmas, between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. Bad planning, I know, but there we go…

I love buying new things. I love getting new things. I even love trying new things (as long as they’re not too dramatic, and really not energetic at all). New clothes, new books, new recipes, new earrings, new shoes, new anything, really. I love planning for it in my head, finding it online (or, even better, in one of our lovely local independent shops), and I particularly love wearing it, or using it, or reading it, and revelling in that feeling of newness and hedonism all day long.

IMG_20190102_171911
There’s nothing quite like Rocket Dog boots and dangly earrings…

So there I was, sitting in a Quaker meeting at the end of two months of fairly non-stop newness, thinking about what I might try to change in 2019, and I came across this:

We live in a part of the world where the dominant motivation is material self-interest, justified by the concept of personal freedom. In these circumstances, the rich get richer and the poor, for the most part, become comparatively poorer. […] What are we doing to proclaim our joyful acceptance that our living standards are going to have to drop; what are we doing to join with other Christians and concerned fellow-citizens to proclaim the vulgarity of our affluent style of living; what are we doing […] to recognise the need for change?

Quaker Faith and Practice, 25:12

What this means to me is that I need to get used to the idea that I should have less, so that other people can have more. I should appreciate the gifts that I have, rather than always looking to the next thing, the new thing, the shiny pretty things. My faith tells me that we must treat others as well as we would want to be treated, and always see the best in the world and those around us. This is a way of showing the world God, and what God wants us to do in the world.

In setting myself Challenge 2019, I said that my goal was to find things that have a positive impact, without needing a mammoth amount of energy to complete them. For Challenge January, I am taking that entirely literally. My challenge to myself is to buy nothing that is non-essential for the whole month.* Instead, I will focus on the things readily available to me – those already in my wardrobe, on my bookshelves, and in the world around me. The thing I am most worried about in meeting this challenge is that I will need to find a way to feed that desire for the new, the interesting, the flattering, without constantly feeding my consumerist side. In fact, that sounds like a good topic for #ChallengeFebruary…

*By essential, I mean food, fuel, cleaning products, and school jumpers to replace those that have mysteriously vanished into the black hole that is the lair of the Primary School Jumper Thief. I may also mean chocolate. I think it is very unlikely that I will get through the whole of January without chocolate being essential at least once.

IMG_20160823_182328-2.jpg
A swan, a canal, a beautifully sunny day.

Challenge 2019. Definitely not a New Year resolution.

Simply Messy4 Comments

Picture the scene. It is New Year’s Eve, far too many years ago to admit to. A group of enthusiastic – and rather tipsy – 20-somethings gather together to bring in the New Year. Resolutely, they avoid resolutions as being so last year, and instead make New Year Goals. Just one thing, one action, to commit to and achieve in the coming year.

I don’t know how many of the other people in that room did, in fact, achieve their goal. I do know that I did, and in doing so, discovered something remarkable about myself. That remarkable thing is that if I keep it simple and only focus on one thing, I actually have a chance of achieving it.

Back at the very end of 2005 (OK, I’ll admit how long ago it was, hard though it is for me to believe it now) my goal was to travel to Kenya. It had been an ambition of mine for as long as I could remember, in that way that you have dreams that you never imagine might actually come true. But by the time New Year’s Eve 2006 came around, I had not only planned and fund-raised for a trip to Kenya, I had spent 3 months there – 3 months that continue to influence my mindset and viewpoint on life today.

Children from Tumaini Timbwani playing in the Indian Ocean

Every year since, I have tried to replicate this extraordinary feat of perseverance and determination. Or at least, I have tried to stick to a New Year Goal for a whole year. I have never managed it since. Thinking about it now, I have realised the key difference between 2005 and every other year. Ever since then, I have gone back to my previous style, trying to think of behaviours that I wanted to change or improve. What I have not done is chosen one thing, one action, that is both achievable and something that is concrete enough to be ticked off on a to do list once complete.

Life these days is rather more complicated than it was in 2005. For a start, back then I did not have to work in order to afford my childcare bill, and could quit my job and volunteer on another continent for 3 months. Now it takes me about that long to plan a trip to Ikea, and twice as long to recover from it. So I am not going to set one, big, New Year Goal for myself this year. Instead, I am starting Challenge 2019. Every month, I will choose a new, smaller, inevitably duller, New Year Goal. It must be achievable within a month, on a budget, with no time and even less energy (well, hopefully it will be at least two of these things!) And finally, it must be something that will help me, or us as a whole, messy, family, live a more simple, sustainable life.

Challenge January is coming soon, and already slightly planned… Any suggestions for Challenge February will be gratefully received!

Elephants! Lifelong ambition achieved…