There is an old saying that "a stitch in time saves nine." It is one of those wise saws that hardly surfaces any more. Our younger daughter, in her early twenties, asked me for examples of tradtional sayings recently and I trotted this one out. It took a bit of explaining about the notion of caring for something so it lasts. What a concept in our disposable world.
I have noticed lately that while we are inundated with news of layoffs and downsizing there are stories of businesses that are thriving. These are the car repair shops, and the tailors, and shoe repair stores. They have so much business they can't keep up. Rather than tossing out our stuff, we are choosing to mend and fix it.
This isn't much solace to an ailing car industry or other businesses which sell new items but does it say something about a correction in our society? Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer prize-winning author thinks it may be the silver lining to our dark economic cloud. Our economy has been driven by "more" despite the toll it takes on the environment and the inequities it creates in the global picture of wealth.
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can’t do this anymore.
We can’t do this anymore.
Jesus encouraged simplicity and contentment in a society where people had little to start with. He saw the addiction to acquiring more and more as a spiritual issue. It's a tough one, because meaningful work is also a spiritual issue, but it is worth pondering.
Has the economic downturn encouraged simplicity in your household? Is this a spiritual concern?
4 comments:
Two books that have been well read and often quoted from in our household are "Limits to Growth" and "Small is Beautiful". Growing up, my Mom made us read these books and I then made my son read them. Thanks for your blogs.
Something I have noticed while watching TV is the nubmer of TV shows "teaching" us how to live as my husband and I have always lived. Sometimes we find much humor in these "thought provoking" ideas. We have shaken our heads at people on the screen who really didn't think they could cope with scaling down on the number of times they eat out in a week. Or passing up on another new pair of shoes.(Sometimes there are tears involved) We have seen televised visions of closets stuffed to the gills with boxes and boxes of shoes, and clothes with the tags still on, and so on and so on. It boggles our minds that people are "struggling" with the concepts of simplified living. It seems to me that these people are literaly being eaten by their 'stuff'.
I am trying to simplify things by (in season) canning more and buying locally. Believe it or not, a Girl Guide Badge is all on simplicty of things, canning, sewing, reusing, recreating etc. Guess what is on the plate this summer for our nine year old?
I have also more recently pulled out my sewing machine and mended my husband's pants, and my winter coat, rather than buying new. I agree with Pupil, much of the "stuff" we have accumulated, we really don't need.
Thank you for each of these responses. All of them contribute to the conversation in different ways. Schumacher's book, Small is Beautiful, is a classic.
I would agree with the comment that people are eaten by their stuff.
It is a good point that groups in the Guiding/Scouting movement, 4H, and others teach life skills that aren't taught elsewhere, yet these groups are waning.
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