Linda Price
1. What does living simply mean to you?
Simplicity is single-mindedness, the ordering of one’s life around a single purpose – for us as Christians, that is devotion to God – the pruning away of everything else. It’s the voluntary stripping away of anything that does not help you reach your main goal. Simplicity is not involuntary; involuntary simplicity is poverty. Simplicity is not selfish or self-centered. I like these quotes from Living More With Less by Doris Jantzen Longacre which say it better than I could: “Simplicity is a narrow road of self-discipline, but the alternative – money and materialism- is only another master.” Simplicity is “not restriction, sacrifice, denial. It is emancipation.”
2. Why is it important to you? (finances, faith, politics, etc)
Simple living is important to us because it is the best way we have found to achieve our main goals. First, we want to leave the earth better and healthier than we found it. By living simply, we are partnering with others to be part of the solution rather than adding to the problem. As stewards of the earth, people should always think about how their actions will affect what they are charged to care for. Secondly, living simply is financially responsible. Simply put, if we were in debt, we would limit our options. Having no debt, we have options to work in jobs that we enjoy, work fewer hours per week, and be generous with our resources. Thirdly, when our lives are in balance, we have time, energy and money to give to our passions of teaching, traveling and spending time with our family.
3. What steps have you taken to live simply in your day to day life?
We’ve always been a simple living couple. John and I both had parents who modeled financial responsibility and we’ve tried to model that for our own four children who are now adults. No matter where we have lived (and we’ve lived in a lot of places!), we have made sure that we had no debt, that we lived below our means (sometimes that was difficult), that we saved and invested our money even if it wasn’t much. We have chosen to buy less home than we can afford. Every Saturday, we buy most of our produce from the local farmers market and we plant a small garden because eating locally grown food is important to us. We seldom eat in restaurants. For the past three years, we have each worked part time because ‘it’s enough.’ We keep our needs and wants small, so we don’t always think we need more.
4. What’s been the hardest part of your simple journey?
For John, limiting the number of books he owns has been the hardest. For me, it has been harder to not pay attention to how others live and not compare our lives with theirs. Also I’m a bit sentimental and have to discipline myself to not keep things just ‘for the memory.’
5. What advice would you give others who are on the living simple journey?
Advice? Get control of your finances. Don’t gratify every desire for stuff. Stuff doesn’t satisfy. Find balance in your physical, spiritual, and financial life. Learn to be generous. Buy less, save more. Learn how to have fun without spending money. Be content. Remember that you’re in this for the long haul–it’s a life commitment that will produce so much more contentment than stuff ever could. Simple living shouldn’t be the big deal that is different and non mainstream. It’s just common sense living in the twenty-first century!
We have a pattern that we follow when we buy equipment for a new activity — camping and cycling are two examples. We start by buying cheap or used equipment to see if we really will enjoy the activity (in industry, they call it “proof of concept”). If we decide to follow through, we replace the cheap stuff with much better quality equipment, then give the other away. For us simplicity is found in limiting the number of things we try to do, then doing them at a level that we can really enjoy.
Linda is a wife, mother of four, grandma and teacher. When she’s not out walking on the beach, biking with her husband, taking photographs, or knitting another sweater, she is working in her little garden, decluttering something, or blogging at willowscottage.com. Having spent several years living and working among the world’s poorest of the poor in the US and beyond its borders, Linda and her husband John realize that even lived at its simplest, life in the western world is rich beyond most of the world’s comprehension.
Five questions with Linda Price
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