One Month of (Almost) No New Things

Today marks one month of our no-more-new-things project. I told this to Ben when he asked if he could buy a Lego star wars set he'd found online this morning and he was impressed. "It's been one month already!?" he asked, surprised. (Ben, in fact, asked if Lego "counted" as a new thing. I smiled to myself since for me lego [plastic! expensive! excessive!] is the epitome of what counts.)

This one month marker seems like a good time to reflect on the project thus far. I expected it to be relatively easy to avoid buying new things during this time period and it has, as predicted, been relatively easy. What I didn't expect is that it would have such a palpable impact on the quality of my life. That is, I thought it wouldn't be too hard but I hadn't imagined that it would actually improve our lives in so many unexpected ways. It turns out that it is fun to think about other ways to do things. Often these other ways of doing things are creative (art projects, thinking outside the box on various things) or involve meeting and talking to people (going to other people's houses and buying stuff from them, meeting people who come to our house, and so each consumer exchange is also a mini people exchange [one example: we were selling our old radiators and an artist responded to the ad, came by and explained her art project as we stood outside our house in the rain trying to figure out how to get the rad into her car, told us where we'd see our old rad--as art!--in the show she was doing downtown, enlisted our neighbour to help lift the rad into her car; the whole exchange was a small interlude in our lives that we would not have had if we'd just put the rad in the dumpster--and now our old thing is going on to a new life]). It turns out, not surprisingly, that doing things creatively, thinking about things, meeting people and talking to them, makes life better. And just noticing what we buy and don't buy makes me more aware of how I live my life in general; and that simple fact of noticing and being aware also makes life better. So one unexpected thing was that instead of struggling to get by with fewer things our lives improved with fewer things.

Another unexpected thing was the way that this project spilled over into other areas of our life. Partly it's just our weird turn to a nineteenth-century world where we're making more things now: not just arts and crafts but meals and games too. It started with the need to make presents and then shifted to the desire just to make things (and food) in general. (The other day Michal was baking and we didn't have baking powder [or soda, I can't remember] and so she made it by looking it up on the internet.) Even more weirdly, the kids are watching less tv. The most surprising shift for me, though, is that not buying new things has spilled over into not really feeling like buying anything. I never imagined that. I thought I would be spending lots of spare time in secondhand stores and that my buying desires would be satisfied by used and secondhand stuff but this hasn't been the case at all. I also noted at the outset that magazines would be an exemption since I buy magazines all the time and could not imagine not doing so, and yet in the past month I have bought only one magazine. This new awareness of things has also made me more aware of all of the packaging in our lives and I've found myself seeking ways to minimize it much more than I'd anticipated I would initially.

The last unexpected thing relates to the kids. They have been so great. They have not complained once. And Ben's old pleas to buy something (anything!) on the weekend and when he walked home from school have evaporated. His request for the lego this morning was the first request he had made of that sort the entire time and when I told him that lego was, in fact, a new thing he dropped it and didn't argue at all. I'm still kind of shocked that they accept this just because "we say so." But it is also instructive with respect to the way we raise our kids; they will follow our lead and they don't waffle, as it turns out, when there are clear boundaries.

Final thing: I have learned that, in terms of things, we don't, in fact, need that much.

So this is all very positive (too positive!), I know; we'll see what the next month brings.