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.

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.