by W. Bradford Swift

In Lewis Carroll's childhood classic, Through the Looking-Glass, one of Alice's misadventures in Wonderland is with the Red Queen who takes her on a wild run through the countryside. But no matter how fast Alice runs she can't seem to get anywhere.

Finally, breathless from her efforts, the Queen allows her to rest long enough for Alice to comment that "Everything is just as it was!" to which the Queen replies, "...Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Several years ago, I remembered Alice's predicament, as I stood on the deck outside my home, gazing into a meandering stream threading its way through my back yard. I thought Alice must have felt similar to how I was feeling about my life.

I was physically exhausted and emotionally out of breathe, running as fast as I could to keep up with an out-of-control lifestyle of my own making.

As I gazed across the wooded lot and listened to the bubbling of the water across the rocks, I realized the scene before me had been much of the reason I had purchased the home about a year before.

At the time I had imagined spending countless hours out on the deck, basking in the sun, watching the seasons roll by, but the seasons had rolled by without me. I'd not so much as stepped foot on the deck in all that time.

I'd been too busy working 50-60 hours a week at my veterinary practice so I could pay the mortgage on the house, not to mention keeping two car payments up, and the three credit cards paid down.

Like Alice, I realized something was wrong with this picture. I was running as fast as I could just to keep up.

I'd like to say that out of that realization I put the house on the market, traded the cars in for older models without payments, cut up my credit cards, and started living a simpler life.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. I hadn't suffered enough yet. It wasn't until my second marriage ended in divorce and I came close to burn out in my profession before the lesson finally hit home.

However, the seed of an idea was planted that day, many years ago, and though it took a while, the harvest of a simple life my new wife and I have designed is sweet and well worth the wait.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF SIMPLE LIVING

My personal journey to a simpler life was motivated by two factors fatigue and frustration. I'd been on the fast track ever since taking my first part-time job at the age of 15 working at the library downtown.

I held my nose to the proverbial grind stone through junior and senior high school, being sure to make the types of grades that would prove to the world that I was worthy of attending veterinary college.

I even managed to rush through undergraduate school, completing a four year pre-vet program in less than three. By the time the mid-eighties rolled around, I'd been hoofing it hot and heavy for over twenty years, and by American standards, I was a success.

Yet despite all the success trappings, I kept thinking, "Is this all there is?"

My frustration grew out of a lack of finding meaningful ways to express my natural creative interests. Although my art teachers in high school had urged me to continue studying art in college, I would hear none of it.

I knew artists starved and veterinarians didn't. Yet, by the time I found myself standing on my deck contemplating the similarities between Alice's predicament and my own, I was starved creatively and spiritually.

Selling my veterinary practice in 1989 to become a freelance writer seemed like an excellent way to take a long break from running as fast as I could just to stay in the same place.

I envisioned sitting on my deck tapping away on the keyboard for a couple hours each day, but when I realized how much money the deck was costing me, I decided if the little nest egg from the sale of my practice was going to last more than six months, I'd better find a less expensive deck to sit upon.

Although at the time I hadn't even heard the term "voluntary simplicity," these moves to simplify my life just "felt right," even though some of my friends and family thought I must have brain damage from breathing too much anesthetic while performing surgery.

About this time Ann and I met and fell in love. Ann not only supported the career change but had a small townhouse complete with deck. I rented out my home in order to reduce expenses and paid Ann rent on her spare bedroom.

Could life be this easy, I thought? On this occasion the answer was no. I discovered over the next year that making a living as a freelance writer wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

After a year of rejection letters and watching my savings rapidly dwindle, I jumped at the chance when a good friend of mine offered me the opportunity to come to work as a business consultant.

The regular salary allowed us to move back to the larger home and lease the smaller one. Two years and one marriage later, I realized I had come full circle, once again working a 50 to 60 hour job that paid well but didn't give me the time for my creative outlet.

A pivotal time came with the arrival of my daughter, Amber. While she was still an infant, I slowed down long enough to notice the families around me. With most of our friends, both the husband and wife worked, and the kids were farmed out to overflowing day care centers.

Neither Ann nor I wanted that for Amber. It had taken me over forty years to get around to having a child and I wasn't interested in being an absentee father.

Still, it took me several weeks before I built up enough nerve to discuss my thoughts with Ann. After all, I had a secure job complete with an excellent salary and long term benefits.

So what if I wasn't happy? I was a good provider. Finally, one afternoon while driving home from visiting friends, I poured my feelings out, ending with, "I think I should quit my job and go back to writing. What do you think?"

To my astonishment, Ann replied, "I agree." Instantly, a great burden lifted from my shoulders and we started making plans for "right-sizing" our life to fit our new direction.

After struggling to keep two different houses for over two years, we sold the larger house within a few short months, in the process consolidating two houses of furniture into one. The more we sold and gave away, the more freedom we experienced.

Looking back, I realize now that there was a certain "chicken or the egg" phenomenon to simplifying my life. There was an inner as well as outer process that seemed to work simultaneously or were so interwoven that it's difficult to tell which came first.

Richard Gregg, who coined the term "voluntary simplicity" back in 1936 points to this outward slowing down process that frees up ones time to pursue the inner work that continues the cycle.

One of the first things our decision to slow down gave us was time time to take long walks with Amber in the stroller; time to get to know each other better and to explore our values.

Fortunately, we discovered we shared many of the same values. With each discovery our relationship grew stronger. Gregg, himself an interesting mixture of Eastern and Western cultures, having lived in India as a student of Gandhi as well as attending Harvard, describes this inner and outer work in this way:

"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life.

It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose."

While I wasn't sure what my life purpose was yet, the urge to write was too strong to ignore, and it became increasingly clear that we were willing to reduce our material wants so I could focus more on my writing and so we would have time together as a family.

Ann learned from reading The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyzyn that we could save significantly by buying our food in bulk and storing it under our bed. We cut back on eating out as well as our movie going. Instead we waited a few months for the movies we wanted to see to come out on video.

Then we discovered if we waited a few more months, we could find the same videos for rent at a local discount store for one-third the price. Each discovery was a small victory for our new lifestyle.

Although these steps might sound like a move to deprivation and austerity, we didn't find it to be so.

"That is the greatest misconception about what simple living is about," says Bo Lozoff, cofounder with his wife, Sita, of the Human Kindness Foundation. The Lozoff's have practiced voluntary simplicity for close to thirty years, after living on a boat while in their twenties and realizing the joys of such simple living.

"If someone approaches it in that way, they will feel poor," says Bo. "The whole point of giving things up is that you feel the richness that results, a psychic release of just not having a bunch of stuff, and not having to be on this constant treadmill to keep the stuff. Simplicity is a great joy, not a punishment or stern discipline."

Meanwhile we continued making inner discoveries as well, including that we shared an intense interest in further developing our spirituality. A whole new dimension of simple living began to unfold.

Having turned my back on my southern Baptist background around the fourth grade, I had missed Jesus' message to "not store up treasures on earth," but to share our wealth and ourselves with others.

I've since learned that Jesus wasn't the only spiritual leader who advocated the virtues of simple living. Buddha also urged a balanced path between indulgence and deprivation, and Confucius, Lao-tzu, Mohammed, and many others also taught the value of simplicity as well as finding a balance between the inner and outer aspects of our lives.

The idea of simple living isn't new in our American culture, dating back at least to the days of Thoreau's two-plus years at Walden Pond, as well as to the frugal, self-reliant lifestyles of the Puritans.

The idea has, at times, struggled with its own identity crisis, being called many different names including, "the frugality phenomenon," "creative simplicity," and more recently "down-sizing," "right-sizing" and "downshifting."

Although we weren't sure what to call what we were doing either, we did notice that the more steps we took to simplify, including purging the clutter around us through yards sales and through donating boxes upon boxes of clothes, knickknacks, and household items to the Salvation Army, the more time we had to explore what truly satisfied us.

We began volunteering some of our newly found time to organizations and causes we believed in. Again, many of our friends didn't understood what we were doing. "You spend that much time working without pay?" they'd ask incredulously.

We tried to explain that, although our pay could not be socked away in the bank, we were being more than adequately compensated by being able to contribute to others. Some understood, others walked away shaking their heads.

In this way we slowly found ourselves encircled with people who understood and supported our efforts, and we started to notice there were more people interested in living a simple life than we'd first imagined.

Then one day, while reading a book review in the newspaper, I found out what we had become DOMOs.

According to the book, Trash Cash, Fizzbos, and Flatliners: A Dictionary of Today's Words, DOMOs are "downwardly mobile professionals, typically under 40, who abandon a successful or promising career to concentrate on more meaningful or spiritual activities."

It was a relief to realize that there were enough other people out there doing what we were doing to finally be named. Down with Yuppies, up with DOMOs.

Despite having trouble coming up with a term that satisfies everyone, we may look back at the nineties as the decade when simple living finally caught on as an "idea whose time has come."

According to a recent study, Yearning for Balance, prepared for the Merck Family Fund by The Harwood Group, the road to DOMOdom is filled with former Yuppie baby-boomers with 72% of people aged 40-49 agreeing with the survey statement, "I would like to simplify my life."

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone who would like to simplify has taken the necessary steps, but many of them appear to be moving in that direction.

Twenty-eight percent of all the respondents said that "in the last five years, they had voluntarily made changes in their life which resulted in making less money not including those who had taken a regularly scheduled retirement."

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W. Bradford Swift is the Founder and Director of the Life On Purpose Institute, with a mission of advancing “A world where all people live purposeful, passionate and playful lives of service; lives of mindful abundance balanced with simplicity; and spiritual serenity.

His books include Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life
 [Paperback]  [MP3 Audio Download]

Visit Life On Purpose for a wide range of programs and resources.

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