rebeccmeister | Simplifying

This has been one of those weeks where I have to just keep telling myself that it's good enough to survive and get by. I won't clean the bathroom until the weekend, or try to make it over to the Farm Patch or Brazos Natural Foods or Village Foods for that handful of food items that just make eating a bit more pleasant. I'm just working on school and crew and making sure I eat, period. And sleep.

Towards the beginning of August, when I was having a hard time emotionally, one of my aunts sent me a message on Facebook about pressure to do things "the right way" to the point where life just isn't enjoyable any more. She and her husband met through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which is a program that places people in low-income communities to help out in the community, while also adopting a life of voluntary simplicity, living below the poverty line. I remember hearing about the program while I was in high school and finding it intriguing - of course, it's easy to have romantic ideas about voluntary poverty when one isn't actually living that way. The long and short of my aunt's message is here:

[Our social justice and environmental efforts] became the center of our life and our world. But we weren't really having fun. We needed to have fun as well and let go of many of the heavy thoughts that we had that were bringing us down. There was nothing wrong with living the way we were living but it just was too much. So we started to ease up on all the pressure we were putting on ourselves to 'do the right thing' all the time.

I'm a perfectionist by nature, and tend to keep lists of ambitions close at hand. I almost wonder if maybe it was a good thing in some respects to lose the Things to Make and Do journal, so I can start over on the list. I've tried very hard to create a life for myself here that is aligned with my beliefs, but perhaps my aunt is right about those pressures.

The night I got back into town, I went to the H-E-B that's close to my house for some groceries, and bought bread and yogurt, items I've mostly been making for myself. That takes off a lot of cognitive load for me - while neither is especially hard to make, their preparation involves the choreography of activities. Another thing that has been difficult to manage is just this whole issue of having food to eat on hand, when I'm out of the house so much. Last spring I managed to prepare some stuff and froze it for days when I was out late. I don't know all of what I'll do this fall, but I hope I can find ways to simplify my food management.

A benefit of travel is perspective; distance from one's everyday life provides a chance to reflect on that life - what's working, what isn't, what could stand to change.