We live close to the football stadium in our small to middle size city. We are no longer a town but a city and just like many today we are growing so fast it is hard to keep up with the changes. But tonight is the first football game of the season. School has just started back after summer break and there has been a lot of hustle and bustle going on with the kids going back to school.
We can hear the school band playing tonight and we know when there has been a touchdown from the cheers. We are no longer that small town where most all shopping is done downtown because the stores have spread out all over town and there are large shopping and eating areas just about anywhere.
We seldom get out in the evening but when we do I am always shocked at the packed restaurants.
Things are much different now, going to school is expensive and and just getting in the car to go somewhere in town is like loading up to go out of town on a trip as I see families loading up the kids to go somewhere most every day. It makes me exhausted to even watch them.
Can we really go back in time? No but we can live more like the past and it all depends on ourselves.
What do we do if we don't like the way things are today?
What we did was we just changed. We started paying off our debt and increased our savings any way we could.
We spent some money on things that would help us to save money. We got rid of and sometimes replaced items for much older items that would help us in some way. Our rule is, if it stays it must have a purpose.
We don't have babies any longer in our home but if we did we would be using this style of baby diapers as I once did when my children were babies because they are simple. This type cleans better and dries much faster.
This is the only type of diapers I knew about until I had Grandchildren. I don't know how people afford disposable diapers and I shutter to think of all of those diapers filling up the landfill and I often wonder what is in a disposable diaper that sits against a baby's skin.
Our younger generation does not know how to use these simple diapers as we older folks did. I have concerns for our younger generations because of the expenses they have that we did not have in the past. We need to share how to do things like we did in the past so the younger generations have an option to avoid the financial burdens of today.
Before we changed to our simple life our modern life was physically and mentally making us sick. We were overweight, exhausted and in debt. This had to change, it was time to get back to basics and go back home to a better time.
If I go somewhere now where a television is on I just cannot believe that I used to sit there in a chair and watch that for hours. I cannot believe I listened to those commercials but I did.
Life is like this sugar bowl. We all know that too much sugar is not good for us. In my case even a little sugar was causing inflammation. I was the only one that could do something about this. I am not diabetic but sugar was literally making me ill.
I now can eat desserts with little to no problem "if" I keep it in moderation and just enjoy it occasionally. We need some sugar in our bodies but when our diet is completely a mess and not healthy many foods that should not bother us can start giving us trouble.
In our case, the best thing we ever did was to step back to basics and do something about these issues.
I do not know of anything that is completely simple, we can get everything nice and tidy and then it gets messed up again. But I can say that we can make changes to thin out the clutter and make our lives less hectic so we have time to do the necessary work to keep our home less messy.
We can get ourselves to a place where it is more simple.
We need to get more sleep. For Charles and I that means we have to go to bed very early because we get up early. We try to be in bed by 7:30 PM and we get up around 4:30 AM. We know that in today's world many people including children are not even home by that time. As I am typing this right now it is 7:04 PM and cars are passing by one right after another heading down to the stadium to go to the football game, it is Thursday night and children will be going to school early and the game has not even started. In the past, we never had football games on a Thursday night.
When my children were young we tried to eat supper somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 and my friend and neighbor always had supper on the table at 5:00 PM. When I was young we ate supper at 5:00 pm.
Children that are going to school need to go to bed very early to get enough sleep so they are not sleep deprived and can concentrate in school and this has not changed.
I am shutting down my computer at this time because it is my bedtime and I will continue tomorrow. This is what we must do to live sensible, we just turn it off.
This is the next day.....
I want to talk about filler food.
When I say filler food it is not just about food but does include food. Charles and I seldom eat out and we have occasionally eaten at a restaurant that has a buffet. The kind of place that the food is cheap and you can eat all you want. We call those places filler food because we know the food is not good but it fills you up.
Filler food would be fast food, we know it is not good for us but we stop anyway because we are in a hurry even knowing this is not healthy.
People eat filler food often when their schedules are full and have too much to do to cook or just don't want to cook.
"Filler Food", can be so many other things.
It can be doing so many things that are truly not important or necessary and it takes our time away so we have to do everything at home very fast to get it done or let it pile up.
We know that hanging laundry outside costs nothing and it helps to sanitize our laundry, give it a fresh smell but so many people just toss it in a clothes dryer and let it run up the electric bill. Sometimes they let it sit and then have to fluff it over and over.
I often get mine out early in the morning and sometimes I hang it before the sun even comes up so it has plenty of time to dry because I am busy too but this is part of my important things to do. Is laundry actually scheduled into your important things to do?
Sometimes filler food is going to Target or the mall or some other shopping place to go shopping just because, no other reason but just because when we could be home washing dishes or changing sheets. Some bad habits are doing other things to avoid doing things we do not want to do which only drains our energy more and often leads to debt.
The best way to do the things we don't like doing is change our attitude.
I choose to romanticize our home. I go to a mental place and remember the generations in the past, how my family lived. The good times we had.
It is like knitting a washcloth, when we get one done we start over to make another one. Knitting dishcloths is not filler food because they are useful. Watching television is filler food, we sit there and numb ourselves to avoid things and before we know it hours have gone by, it is very late and now we will not get the sleep we need because we have eaten a diet of filler food and we have wasted our day with filler food.
We should ask ourselves the question, is this filler food?
When I was a little girl I had a canopy bed. Not like the ones today with foo foo things and princess things. I had a grown up cotton and lace canopy with the high 4 poster bed.
I kept my room clean and I did not have all the things we have today and remember there were no electronics.
Often I would lay in my bed and use my imagination to think about things. I lived in a time when a child could do nothing and enjoy themselves just thinking. I lived in a time when I could lay in the grass and watch the clouds and imagine rabbits hopping by. Children need a way to be okay without stimulation. I could sit on the back porch at my grandmothers and just watch butterflies and birds and chickens.
Today when children go to the zoo or visit a farm or go to see animals there is so much stimulation involved that they cannot settle to really take in what they are seeing. We need time to observe and study and this is missing today.
I think a parent should take a child to the park to sit on the bench and watch things as a learning lesson to be able to learn how to observe. Not to go running through the park like a maniac to get their energy out as a parent would say.
If we keep eating filler food we get sick. There is a way to do things right and the best part is as I have said before is we can start right this minute to right a wrong. We can start right this minute to get out of debt. We can start right this minute to be a better mom or dad. We can start right this minute to be a better wife or husband. We can start right this minute to be a better sibling. We can start right this minute to be a better boss. We can start right this minute to be a better teacher (which includes parenting). We can start right this minute to be a better employee. We can start right this minute to be a better daughter or son.
We can start right this minute to fix our mistakes. Those things are done, we can live like the past but not in the past so we must move forward even if we are grieving because no matter how much we loved someone and miss someone we must take care of ourselves so we don't pull down others and become a burden on someone else so we have to eat and take care of ourselves and do our best to be happy.
People seem to live on high speed with or without drugs. In the past when we read books we often read a book over and over until we memorized part or all of it. Today because of electronic books we read a book and move to another book and then another book and so on. I remember enjoying getting to favorite parts and saying out loud parts I was reading because I knew the lines. I don't know if many people do this today.
Still as an adult I enjoy Beatrix Potter. My daughter bought me this journal as I do love journals. I enjoy flipping through the pages of this book as I do not tire from it because it reminds me of the past. I do work a full day because I am a homemaker but I still have rest times.
My Grandmother kept scrapbooks. She pasted newspaper articles, stories, weddings, deaths, anniversaries, war news, news about our family, letters and anything she found important. I am so thankful she did this as she preserved things that happened during the time she lived and is such a time capsule for us today.
But today people do scrap booking the expensive way as companies have found ways to make money so they entice people to scrapbook buying their goods to use for scrap booking when we do not need these things because they are filler food.
We can scrap book on paper bags and we get enough junk mail to use to make many pages to glue articles on. If we just think frugal we can save a lot of money. Just like many hobbies we should make these have purpose and not just add clutter to our home.
I remember in the 1970s and 80s when crafting became filler food. We were making most anything and our houses filled with clutter as it often does when a hobby turns into an addiction.
One of my family members liked elephants. Once the family knew she liked elephants everyone gave her an elephant for special occasions and she had elephants all over the house collecting dust. Then she needed a cabinet and the cabinet filled over but she could not get rid of any of them because people gave them to her and this became a serious clutter issue.
It is ok to get rid of things that people gave us. It is ok to let go to make our homes healthier. Dust is not good for us and items in our home need air space around them. As I get older I need our home to be easier to clean so I am having to let go of things to give better access for cleaning. I am moving in that direction to make this happen.
The title of this post is, Is it this simple? Many things in life take much effort but yes we can make our life simple, we have the power to do this.
Simple to people can have different meanings so what one thinks may be simple may not be to another.
We can make things more simple by clearing our minds, stopping the filler food, don't go shopping and spend money just to fill a void.
We can make our life have purpose, we can make our house a real home, we can calm our family by calming ourselves. We can make life more simple.
Grandma Donna
