No more sleepwalking. Things are changing.

My resolution of not buying anything new has been influencing my thoughts and feelings since the beginning of this year in ways that I didn’t expect.

The initial impressions were those of excitement and motivation. I was filled with nice and heart-warming sensations. I felt liberated and appreciated the beauty and luxury around. The first weeks of not buying gave me almost instantaneously a sense of pride and accomplishment to the point that I was almost congratulating myself on how undisturbed my routines and mindset were to that point. I’ve been on the top of the world and then things started changing this week… I’ve started changing this week…

I’ve been examining the contents of our house and I’ve been discovering things… items that I have bought at various stages of my life… things that I have bought for myself and my son at a whim… objects that I found absolutely necessary at the time of purchase and forgotten about them a while later… As I was going through all these things I was getting more and more uncomfortable… The items that I was holding were not really what I had bought… I had been buying something else… I had been buying the routes to and symbols of security and comfort… appreciation and acceptance… I had been shopping for elegance, intelligence, affection, ambitions and confidence… I had been buying resilience… character… adventure… health. I had been buying those things not realising that none of them was in fact sold. And I was just an average consumer. Aware, informed and with good knowledge of advertising strategies and marketing, I have still sleepwalked into this trap… naïvely thinking that by purchasing something I have found a way forward to whatever plan, aspiration or ache I had at the time.

I don’t want to sleepwalk anymore. I don’t want to consume dreams. I want to work to make them come true. I don’t want to consume feelings. I want to express them. I don’t want to consume plans. I want to see them through. I don’t want to consume character traits. I want to develop them.

I had been trying to satiate the needs that those items were never able to fill on their own… I had been deceiving myself… Now I want to fill those needs without those items because to be frank I am terribly angry… and I would like to blame someone but there is no obvious scapegoat so I am just left with this massive and unpleasant feeling of shame and embarrassment… about the way I led my life… about how I replaced the real, raw and genuine sensitivities with stuff.

I want to look after this girl now and her weaknesses and vulnerabilities… and let her own herself… I will not let her exchange dreams for goods. They are too precious to be sold.

Seeing the luxurious

There is a Spanish saying: Mejor solo que mal acompañado, which literally means Better alone than in bad companionship. I always thought that this is true of relationships. That a good relationship, be it friendship, romantic partnership or a work team, reflects the beauty of everyone in it. No one is overshadowed. No one is dwarfed. No one is suppressed. The same is true of objects that fill our homes and other spaces. Their beauty is revealed either when they stand alone or in the right company.

There are many items in my house which have lost their charm either because they’ve been swamped by other stuff or have been overshadowed by bigger or gaudier objects. I’ve started giving space to those little beauties by de-cluttering the house or just altering their arrangement. I’ve learnt through making these small improvements that recognizing the luxurious is all about this… about seeing and presenting things as luxurious although they are common, normal, average, typical and trivial.

Things that are given space stand out. We perceive them as special and we take notice of them. If you think of luxury and beauty in those terms it is almost impossible to have a life that is deprived of them. In that sense, you are never poor. It’s just about perception.. about having the eye that’s willing to see beauty in simplicity… it’s about having or training the beautiful eye.

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness”

~Henry David Thoreau

By the way, have you recently visited any of these blogs: #BehindtheLens or Capturing Little Moments? One of my favourite beauty-spotters recently.

2014 – a year without a luxury

A few days ago I committed myself not to buy anything new in 2014 and to share the money saved with people who normally cannot afford new things (or just things). This initiative has been started by Sash, the writer of Inked in Colour, and I decided to make it part and parcel of my Caring 2014 project. I promised that I would give more details on how I intend to go about it. Sash has recently explained some of her rules so I am now in a good position to explain what this project will mean for my family.

I have spent the last few days thinking about this idea, pondering its possibilities and limitations and primarily who should be affected by this initiative. Should I involve my husband, should I consider things for my child as well, should I only focus on my purchasing habits? I decided now that I will not buy anything new for myself and my son and for the house, with one exception: my husband is half-way through fixing our kitchen at the moment and we have already ordered and purchased items for this purpose and thus I am excluding him and his DIY projects from my resolution. So when I say that I will not buy new things for the house I mean: decorations, blankets, pillows, candles, frames, calendars, flower pots, pictures, bits and pieces that I normally indulge in. Food, medicine, health and safety and hygiene items will not be affected by this challenge as it would be unreasonable to go without them.

So how will this project affect my purchasing habits? I am not going to buy any: books, cosmetics, clothes, CDs, shoes, jewellery, electronic equipment, stationery, films, notebooks… and my biggest pleasures in life.. cups of coffee in coffee shops and sweets… for once I want someone else to have the privilege of affording a cappuccino and a muffin every so often. I will also not buy any toys, gadgets, room accessories for my son and will try to use the clothes and shoes that he has already got (growth permitting). We’ll see if we have enough for this year.

I was asked if nothing new means that I can buy second-hand? My aim is not to buy anything. I do think that it’s wonderful to give a second life to a product. I see lots of good in buying used items, renovating them, restoring their original function and beauty or even improving their look. But I do have some doubts about buying second-hand goods and will share them with you in a separate post. In its original form this initiative allows for buying from second-hand shops. I intend to reuse, re-purpose, mend, sew and clean things that I have to make them last throughout this year and hopefully beyond it. I suspect that in doing so I will stop perceiving chores as unpleasant and burdensome routines but rather as much needed daily acts of care. So in many ways I see this project as transformative not only of my purchasing habits but also of my home and character.

How will I measure what I have saved? How will I know how much to donate? I am well aware of some of my purchasing habits and this awareness helps. For example, I would normally buy a cup of coffee and a sweet every time I meet a friend in town and when I travel away from home… so now every time when these happen, I will put the money that I would spend on those treats into the giving pot. For my other things, I will need to review my past purchases and planned purchases for this year to examine how much my indulgences are worth. I must trust that what I previously spent on luxuries would have been typical. I’ll decide in due course which charity, family or individuals I will donate to and will present rationale for my choice at some later stage.

So what can you expect from Postcards this year? Stories of success and potential failures, stories of people who care, debates on buying or not buying, reflections on different ways of caring for our families, relationships, health and the environment. Sometimes it will be an article with text, other times just pure photo(journalism). I am not setting any limitations on myself how often I will post. It won’t be daily, it might be weekly or biweekly… when the ideas mature.

All in all, I’ve got an impression that things will become much more manageable in 2014. I hope it will be like this for you too.

What are your thoughts about this initiative? Do you want to try?

Nothing New – 2014 Challenge

There are some initiatives that I just cannot resist supporting. This wonderful Aussie mama, Sash from Inked in Colour, has just started one of them. Motivated by greater good and caring, she decided to dedicate 2014 to deliberate living and in so doing she resolved NOT to buy anything new in 2014. Since the themes for Postcards without stamps for this year are those of Caring (The Caring 2014 Project) and Saving to Give, I am jumping enthusiastically on Sash’s bandwagon and am promising myself not to buy anything new in 2014. What I want to do is to transfer the capability to buy new things to those who normally cannot afford it. I don’t want to put the economy out of joint, just gently change who buys – at least just for a year. I want to care for what I’ve got and benefit those that are not as fortunate as I am. Care and Share – these are my two words for this year. The Nothing New initiative will enable me live by these two words.

Are you up for the challenge? At least for a month, a fortnight, one day? Think about it. I’ll write more about how I intend to do it in my next post.

This logo above is from Inked in Colour