Live More Simply - Have More Time

 It is important to make the time for stopping to recharge, rethink, and relax

Although the idea of simple living has been around for thousands of years, it remains a pretty tough sell. It must have something to do with all the talk of living with less, cutting back, and disciplining your desires. Yuck. Why would you want to do that?

For a lot of people, having a root canal without pain killer would be preferable.

But wait! There are many attractive reasons why living more lightly pays off personally, socially, and environmentally. Of them all, one benefit stands out as the premier payback for cutting our materialist ways - having more time.

Time is a precious commodity, and in the process of making a living we can let a big chunk of it slip by in a whirlwind of busyness. It takes a lot of hard work to maintain a 'middle class lifestyle' - big house, two new cars, 1.5 kids, soccer practice, Mexican vacations, Hot Yoga, and stainless steel appliances.

Attaining the trappings of 'success' comes at a price. It takes your time, it sucks your blood, and it leaves a shriveled, cancerous carcass of debt where there used to be the potential of life lived freely and exuberantly.

As people near the end of their life, there is nothing they desire more than time. More time, more time. But when your time is up, no amount of money will buy you a minute more.

In the end you can't buy more time, but you can make more for yourself for no charge right now. You just have to choose to take your time back, live more simply, and make it happen. It may not be that simple at first, but that is how it starts.

The more simply you live, the more time you will have for the things that are important to you, whatever they may be. Even, or perhaps especially, doing nothing.

Charles Bukowski, the American poet, knew the importance of having time to do nothing. He advised we all take leisure time seriously because, “Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything. Just to do nothing at all, is very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.”

Living with less may not sound appealing to some, but having a lot and feeling totally messed up sounds worse to me.

We can't change the world until we have changed ourselves, and that takes time. When we live more simply, we have more time.

This is how it has been for thousands of years.