Inner peace and contentment

When I first started living as I am now, I was searching and hoping for happiness and contentment and thought I might find it with fewer possessions and less attachment to mainstream ideals and what modern life had evolved into. I focused myself on the lifestyle and not what would eventually bring me real happiness, my inner self. I know now that the simple lifestyle is merely the means of attaining that inner peace and contentment; it's not the destination, it's just the ticket to ride.

Of course, when you think about it, the entire package is inner peace and contentment brought about via the daily work we all do in our lives. Everything you do in your day has the potential to deliver or delay that contentment. If we are striving to achieve our own personal happiness that is more likely to come when we work towards it with a purpose without getting sidetracked along the way by incidentals like buying another TV or new shoes. When I began to understand that, it helped me readjust what I did during the day. I stopped watching TV - mainly because I was watching pay TV lifestyle programs where people were looking for their ideal life, or cleaning programs where they'd clean up their lives and homes with the help of an outsider. I realised that I was trying to change my life while watching others try to change theirs. I needed to focus on what I was doing, so the daytime TV stopped. That lead to a kind of domino effect. We didn't watch much TV at all then, the cost of having pay TV was too high a cost in my simplified life, so it went. That freed up my daytime hours to concentrate on planning what I wanted to do. It gave me time to expand our vegetable garden, to learn how to mend and sew, I had time to learn how to make good bread. My goal now was to do everything well and with a purpose. It wasn't good enough just to bake bread, it had to be the best bread I was capable of. There was no reason to bake mediocre bread when we could, with just a few adjustments and more mindfulness, be eating excellent bread.

Being mindful is really the key to this. I discovered that when I slowed my mind down to focus on what I was doing at that minute, without thinking ahead to what was coming later, or what had passed, I was able to work systematically. I could improve what I was doing as I did it, I tried new ways and ditched old ones and eventually, over the course of about a year, I'd developed a new way of working that produced consistent results, I'd taught myself a lot of new skills and rediscovered old ones, and I was happy with my results.

That is the point of simple living to me - happiness. When you're happy with what you're capable of and how you live, whether that is cheering on your child at the school sports day, making the best peach jam you've tasted, delivering a well thought out presentation to your boss, saying hello to your new neighbours, hugging your partner with real affection, enjoying the company of your family and friends or growing the perfect tomato, that will deliver contentment to you. The satisfaction you feel when you do all those commonplace things builds into genuine contentment and self respect. You learn to respect yourself and what you do. That opens up a whole new world of good feelings, it will bring excellence to your life and the ability to be generous.

I know this opinion will be believed by some and not by others, but I know it to be true - as you simplify, consume less and pare back your needs, you will enrich your life. You'll create a new standard of quality for yourself because you'll start making excellent products for yourself instead of buying mediocre ones. And the end result of this new way of living will be that the richness of your everyday life will not allow the mediocrity of mainstream life to impact on you as much as it did in the past. You'll replace the mindlessness of TV, weekly magazines and shopping at the mall with a life full of purpose where you'll want less but be a whole lot more.