Living a Simple Lifestyle: My 4 Stage Journey to Simplicty
The day my family and I decided to start living a more simple lifestyle the world was on fire.
So why not make a dramatic change, move clear across the world, and start over from scratch? Sounds like living a simple life to me!
When I look at the way things are now, I tend to cringe at how things used to be and all of that struggle and change is how I got to where I am today. Looking back at my former life, it’s as if I’m talking about someone else.
It wasn’t until I decided to create this post that I realized how everything worked out, for the better, and now I’m at a place where I can truly feel the world around me soften.
So how exactly did I end up choosing a simple lifestyle? How did my family decide to tag along?
Stage 1: Life Before the Simple Lifestyle
Alright, this may sound ridiculous or dramatic but trust me when I say this is how life was before we began our journey.
We were living in an apartment, literally at a crossroads on what we wanted to do. Buy a house or move to France. In this apartment, there are four of us living in a two-bedroom. Me, the husband and two boys. We also had a storage full of items that wouldn’t fit into our apartment but, most of it was my husband’s stuff, which we refused to get rid of.
We had two vehicles, a lot of tools, and toolboxes.
Just me along I had several boxes of clothes, stacks of purses, and a variety of clothing in my closet. I wore everything but still had more clothing than a person ought to.
Sadly, I felt I needed all this. I needed to have seven jackets and fifteen pairs of jeans. Later I learned this was part of some deep-seated childhood trauma of never having a jacket or enjoy pants.
How did we, and myself get here?
Like with most people we were trying to live the normal American lifestyle. At the time my husband was working in a Fortune five hundred company and I was a paralegal. My oldest son has learning disabilities and my younger son at the time was beginning school.
However, one of the issues we had was our lives were stuffed full of meaninglessness. We weren’t living with intention or even wanting to live the way we were.
Which was why we were at the crossroads, deciding if we wanted to buy a house or make the move to France.
And to be honest the move was incredibly scary, I mean moving overseas isn’t something you just do on a whim. And so I tried. totake. the easy route.
The solution for a long time, was to keep moving. Keep buying things that I have no room for, keep working harder. When actually what we needed, and rarely got was to slow down, take a good long look at what our lives had become.
And so we did, and what we saw we both realized was not what we wanted for ourselves or our children. So we decided to make a change. We needed a more simple way of living.
Stage 2: Getting through the muck
As we looked at our lives we realized we were living a life that was exactly a carbon copy of what everyone else in America was living.
We never took the time to consider if that was the life we really pictured for us.
So we started to imagine what it would be like to start over, would that be a good choice? Could we do it? Or could I, the girl who loves shopping and hates getting dirty live in the country?
Once we settled into the issue, we began to get a clearer picture of what we wanted for ourselves. We knew we couldn’t live the current lifestyle we were living, it was either going to kill us or make us hate each other.
Just as COVID erupted we realized we were not happy or fulfilled. Nor did we feel life was truly what it should be. That was when we prepared ourselves to make the changes to live a simpler life.
We were both ready for that change.
For me mostly, I wanted to experience a different pace of life, environment, and just different.
We knew the kind of life we wanted we wouldn’t get where we were. We looked at different places but honestly, none of them seemed to give us the feels like when we were in Germany.
We wanted a fresh start, and while we had both been to France there was a lot we didn’t know. However we knew we wanted to experience our simple living there ourselves, we wanted to explore and find out more.
And that’s when we started downsizing and decluttering. Spreadsheets were made, itemizing each and everything we had. We were drowning in junk. As soon as we laid out all on the spreadsheet-something that was required for the shipping, we realized there were some things we didn’t need.
So we began going through the storage unit first and started selling things we didn’t need, such as the washer and dryer, fridge, tools that we couldn’t use in France.
Step 3: Adopting a new attitude geared for a simple lifestyle
As we began decluttering we realized we needed to have a cut-and-dry type of mindset. We had to take a hard look at what we had, what could be replaced, and what was not necessary. We had to make adjustments in our perspectives and decide what was really important for us.
With that, we were able to gain better insight on things that we had lost or were forgotten.
Our Values were reestablished.
- Peace of mind
- A sense of control
- Learning how to work together.
- Spending quality time with each other
All of these and much more were important to us, however we couldn’t get there with our current lifestyle. Without realizing it, as soon as we put into place the plan to move we started implementing the plan.
I did fall off the wagon a few times.
Days before we left, I went to Banana Republic and bought a sweater. Mind you I was already traveling with four bags.
But setbacks and falling off the wagon isn’t a bad thing. You can’t quit something cold turkey. That’s not how you break a habit.
This is where COVID-19 was incredibly helpful. See I couldn’t get packages because I was on a time crunch, so that meant no shopping which helped out a lot.
Stage 4: Living a Simple Lifestyle
Now here we are five years later, after years of struggling and working through moments that were beyond our control we have been living with more intention and a more simplistic way of living. We have gained so much, living simply in a fast-paced world.
We learned along the way how to do things we had never learned before. Well, I hadn’t my husband had been a Boy Scout. I learned how to garden, and how to be ok with getting my hands dirty. How to appreciate the gifts that I harvested and created. We utilize a more mindful consumption habit.
We still have stuff, because I’ve realized that I do like warmth and stuff. But I have what I need, and what is truly important to me, and my family. We are more mindful of what we are buying, buying with more intention and purpose.
For instance, I will only buy new clothes if there is a need. I tried teaching (before the move) how to give time back to the community, but we were so busy before. Now, I am able to show my children to give back by donating things that are still good, they’ve just outgrown them.
I am able to teach them the simple skills I’ve learned, like cutting back bushes and cultivating and sowing seeds.
As I’ve said on the blog many times before, it was hard at first. Going down a new path isn’t easy, and sometimes it is uncomfortable. And often times, there was a lot of screaming, crying, and running away from bugs. But that’s only if your path takes you to the country.
It’s also hard to give up things you’ve been conditioned into thinking you need or should have. It feels as though you’re doing something wrong. You also start to think people will find you crazy or see it as you’re failing at something.
However, once you learn to let go and begin to take the first step towards your fresh start to living with intention and creating a simple way of living, you start to see the potential. The life that is full of promises and much more than just creating a carbon copy of what everyone else is doing.
Thanks for stopping by and allowing me to share with you my journey towards a more simple lifestyle. I know that these days, we are all feeling a stressed, overwhelmed and looking for answers to get us to normalcy.
While you can’t control the world around you, you can control your own world with one step at a time by implementing organization, simplifying your life and making choices with mindful intentions. I hope this inspires you to create your own path, and for someone just getting started, living a simple ife may seem a long way away, or something only for the wealthy, here you are supported. Read about the 5 myths on Simple living to help you realize anyone can live with intention.
Our own self improvement journey to simple living isn’t over, it’s a constant day to day approach but the more we implement it the easy it becomes.
Be sure to download your free copy of simple lifestyle guide to help you get started down your own path, and also comment below which tips you find most helpful and what tips you have discovered along the way. I look forward to hearing all about your stories.
