Five Questions with Ragan Sutterfield

Ragan Sutterfield

1. What does living simply mean to you?

Living simply means a more direct relationship to what is essential and important—it means time, it means space. When I live in an openly complicated way there’s no openness to what comes. If Jesus showed up he wouldn’t fit in the schedule. Of course if I am going to open up time I must also manage the things in my life. Since I don’t want to take up too much time with things, I have to reduce their number.

The greatest obstacle to living simply in this time and place is technology. Technology consumes us—it is, as Jacques Ellul said, a vampire. Of course I engage with it from time to time—it’s hard to avoid and even vampires have their uses, but I want to always be able to return it to its cage. That’s why I don’t have the internet at home and I don’t usually have a computer there. I want to have space free from the internet.

Our culture has become completely mediated and I want to find a way beyond that. Many friends of mine have young children and read all kinds of books about how to raise them. While that may be necessary, I think it’s sad. We no longer have direct access to our cultural traditions. Rather than learning from and through our community we learn from some abstract book coming from an abstract place.

The same is true of eating. Americans have “”diets” because we don’t have culture. We don’t have a tradition from which to know how to eat. That tradition has been destroyed by commercialism and commercialism is set on creating as many products as possible to sell. Lot’s of fad diets are great for a commercial culture because it always needs something new to sell.

I suppose that if I were to say what I really hope for in simple living, it is to escape from the multitude of discourses—to live directly.

2. Your Passion and focus seems to be on agriculture and farming—why is it important to you?

I have always been interested in living close to the earth—in getting my hands in the dirt. Most of my childhood was spent in the woods exploring, watching wildlife. But I have also long been interested in literature and art and philosophy and culture. Farming, agriculture, is the place where these two things meet—it’s the borderland between human culture and the wild. When done properly it is a balanced border. When done wrongly—it is a totalitarianism of human desire. That is why simplicity is so important; it allows us to live and farm at nature’s pace.

3. What steps have you taken to live simply in your day to day life?

The key to simplicity for me has been setting limits and living within them. As I said above, I limit technological intrusions as much as possible. I also, increasingly, live as much as possible without a car. I read recently that commuting is the one thing that makes most people unhappy and I believe it. Riding my bike or walking are far better for my mind and body than driving around in a wasteful and stressful vehicle. I still need the car sometimes, but I’m working to lessen that need.

Another thing I do is try to maintain margin. My parents were always big on this when I was growing up and it’s come through (after I learned the hard way that they were right). Margin means leaving 20 minutes to get someplace that I know will take 10 minutes to get to. It means opening space and time in my life. The idea is simple but so many people never learn it and live frantic lives as a result. To live with margin means quitting things and over time I have learned to be very good at that.

4. What’s been the hardest part of your simple journey?

The most difficult thing about simplicity is the start. Simplicity isn’t easy or even always simple. It takes an effort to get started but once the motion is propelled forward it gets easier and the rewards show themselves. For instance cooking at home—I try to cook my own foods as much as possible and yet sometimes it can be difficult to get started. I’ll come home from a long day of work and I may be tempted to eat out. But I can’t live up to my ideal of eating mostly local food if I eat out, so I force myself to get started cooking. In less time than it would take me to get in my car and get to a drive through window I suddenly have a great meal of sweet potato fries with a fried egg and a salad of spring lettuce and pecans—all of it local, some of it from my own garden. After the meal I think, “that wasn’t hard,” but the next night I may well go through the same process of willing myself to get started.

To live simply we have to keep focused on the end—after dinner or the calm of our evening after we ditch the TV or how nice it feels to work close to home even if we took a pay cut to do it.

What advice would you give others who are on the living simply journey?

Keep your focus on health. Simplicity is not a tool for pharisaical judgementalism. Simplicity is a tool for freedom. I heard recently that many therapists are seeing couples who have arguments over things like recycling or wasting water or other environmental quibbles. We shouldn’t make simplicity a tool of coercion or one uping someone—we should seek freedom and invite others to join us in the experiment. It’s all an experiment anyway—we don’t always know what’s going to happen from the outset. We have a hunch, we act on it, we adjust as needed. We must try to keep simplicity as simple as possible.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer, cultural critic, and farmer. He’s written for a variety of magazines including Plenty, Men’s Journal, Paste, Gourmet, Spin, and Books & Culture on issues relating to good food, sustainability, and contemporary culture. He is also one of the founders and operators of a farm at Felder Academy, a public charter school for troubled youth. He blogs at ragansutterfield.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @Ragan

For more of Ragan’s story, listen to his interview on the Something Beautiful Podcast.

Five Questions with Ragan Sutterfield

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