Living in abundance

Last year, a friend from Canada gave me the book Simple Abundance 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life as a gift. It was a costly gift, considering the price and shipping costs from Canada, but one that I gratefully embraced with open arms—and heart. This book is an absolute gem!

Every day, Sarah Ban Breathnach gives us a reflection on how we can live a simple and abundant life. The book came at exactly the right time for me, because this was the path I was already walking myself. The more inspiration, the better.

Last year, I dutifully read the reflection of the day (so on January 24, I read the one for January 24), but because the author sometimes goes on for weeks about the same topic, I started to get a little bored (especially when she spent three weeks talking about gardening, and I don't even have a garden!) so I put the book aside. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I felt called back to the book and now I approach it more instinctively: I just open it wherever and whenever I want, and that works a lot better, because by “chance” (read: God at work!) I always read exactly what I need to hear that day.

This morning I read the reflection for July 6, in which she writes about Scott and Helen Nearing, an American couple who, in 1932, during the Great Depression (the economic crisis in America in the 1930s), left New York City to live a self-sufficient life in the Green Mountains of Vermont. They wrote about their experiences in a book called Living the Good Life. The book only became popular decades later, and then it became a real bestseller. (Interesting fact: when the book was first published, the US had just climbed out of the economic crisis and people were eagerly pursuing “the good life”: a television in every living room, a barbecue in the backyard, and a station wagon on every driveway. America didn't want to hear about the Nearings' simple lifestyle. But when, twenty years later, people began to realize that all that abundance did not make them happy, only then did their book begin to catch on with the general public.)

Still, according to Breathnach, this book is not to be recommended: the Nearings lived a very ascetic life. They didn't eat honey, because ‘that would be exploiting the bees’, nor salt, tea, milk, or eggs. They did allow themselves water, fruit juices, herbs, and seeds and nuts ‘that had already reached the end of their life cycle’. To me, as to Breathnach, it sounds a bit excessive. Okay, a bit too excessive. Not exactly something I would aspire to.

And yet. I believe there is a lot of truth in their lifestyle. Too much is too much, of course, but that also applies to the other side of the spectrum. Working too much, eating too much, doing too many activities, having too much money or too many possessions... these things are also unhealthy, even though they are the norm in our society. That kind of lifestyle didn't work for me. And believe me, I've tried. Balance—something between too little and too much—seems to me to be the key to health, happiness, and inner peace.

A little more about the Nearings: Scott lived till he was 100, and Helen till she was 92. And, a little creepy: when Scott felt that his life was complete, that it had reached a natural end, he simply stopped eating as a ‘final act of self-control’, and that is also how he died six weeks later.

Helen Nearing wrote down her final thoughts, impressions, and a summary of their previously published book in a memoir called Loving and Leaving the Good Life. I haven't read it, but I might do so at some point. Breathnach was kind enough to write a summary of it in her book. I found it very interesting because it is 100% in line with how I have been living my life over the last few years. This is a lifestyle that works for me, and I am glad to see that I am certainly not alone in this.

Helen's suggestions for a life with less stress and more abundance are:

• Do your best, no matter what happens.
• Be at peace with yourself.
• Find a job you enjoy.
• Live in simple circumstances; housing, food, clothing; get rid of clutter.
• Connect with nature every day; feel the earth beneath your feet.
• Exercise by working hard; by gardening or walking.
• Don't worry, live from day to day.
• Share something with someone else every day; if you live alone, write to someone; give something away; help someone else in some way.

In the coming weeks, I want to explore each of these suggestions in more depth. I practice them all to a greater or lesser extent, because they seem to be a natural result of living a spiritual life. I want to take a closer look at them, review them, and explore them in more depth so that I can grow in this area myself. And if I can thereby plant seeds in other people's hearts, then that seems like a wonderful bonus!

Nathalie