Small Revolutions: Voluntary Simplicity in Devon

Room enough for all of us...

If you haven't bought a house in the UK yet, and you're not destined for great things, you're in a pretty awkward situation. Prices have been going sky high.

On my road, in a not so lovely part of Hackney (it's East London, not Chelsea or Mayfair) a 3 bedroom house is currently on the market for £394,000 (that's a shade over $760,000 at today's rates). Which is why we're renting one bedroom in part of a house.

The problem is, I read, that housing stock is increeasing by only 160,000 houses a year. But the numberof people for them is increasing by 200,000. So the market stays high and edges higher.

Green belt laws mean that houses can't be built in certain areas designated as countryside. Meaning that all those fields remain just fields. It has the specific purpose of stopping dwellings encroaching on the countryside, towns merging into each other etc. etc.

This stops new houses being built (any type of house). Although I can see the point of this, I feel disappointed and let down that they don't consider ecological houses as a different class of house.

In the UK, with land at a premium, we're going to have to re-think the way we house ourselves and the way we use our land (and that the rules about using it properly work too).

So it was a welcome sight to see these tiny houses showing that you don't need to build big to have a roof  over your head.

This is my 5 minute crash surfing course on small houses:

• Let's go and look at Henry David Thoreau's house at Walden Pond
• Then watch the video of Gregory Paul Johnson's 140 square foot house (about 3.6m squared) from PBS
• See the gallery of small houses here
• What about a Jot House? Sustainable, low cost, prefabricated.
• Going traditional? Why don't you build your own yurt?
• Visit Jay Shafer's Tiny Tumbleweed Houses - beautiful aren't they?
  

Light-hearted surfing aside though, in the very real housing shortage we have, with sky high prices, houses like this might just become viable prospects for those who, like me and Glenn, don't own our own homes.

Obviously these dwellings test the limits of their art, but living smaller might just be the way that all of us can get the opportunity to live on and own a tiny patch of this, our sceptred isle...

P.S. Antony found a great link to a guy in Denmark who lives in an allotment house. How beautiful life would be if I could live in an allotment house!

We're the change.

"A sustainable future emerges when citizens recognize the absolute necessity of change and use their tools of mass communication to undertake an unprecedented level of dialogue about the most healthy pathway ahead." Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity.

Logging on to my email today, I found an email from the health editor of Red Magazine.

Anna is writing an article for the June issue on voluntary simplicity, so we had a bit of a talk about what it means for me and why I do it.

Despite being horribly hungover (at 2pm in the afternoon) after my leaving do, I was surprised at exactly how much sense I made and how cohesive my thoughts were.

We may or may not get a link to the Voluntary Simplicity Book project. I'm hoping we will.

What's important is this: voluntary simplicity is a step towards ecology, happiness and a better quality of life. The more people that are interested in it, the more people will have a better quality of life and be happy and ecological. It's as simple as that. And we're all contributing in our own way to the health of our world together.

We, as individuals blogging, communicating online, talking together, are starting to create a trend. We are the innovators and change agents in Alan AtKisson's amoeba of culture.

Just by being here. Just by blogging. Or using forums. Or having a website.

It may seem for the most part self-absorbed and "all about me". Which it probably is, really, but who cares? No-one bugged Hemingway because he felt the need to write.

Today I realised that what we're doing here - as individuals, whether it's Jessica, or Dibnah or Mel - each from our own different perspectives really is the start of the kind of 'small revolution' I talked about in What's Your Small Revolution?

I started this blog off with nobody reading me - on average I get about 30 people (unique visitors, not subscribers) a day now. That's 900 a month. Over 10,000 if it continues for a year.

Together, in small and imperceptible ways we are all being the change we want to see in the world.

We may all have small voices individually, but together we shout and we are important and we do make a difference.

Today's small revolution is: keep talking, blogging, emailing, posting, communicating - you do make a difference.

From the conclusion of Walden

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness." (Conclusion, Walden)

I read this this morning, I realised that I have passed that invisible boundary. In the projects I'm undertaking like the voluntary simplicity book, and our plans for leaving the city, the plans for building our own straw bale house. Somehow, everything seems to coalesce, arrange itself serendipitously around us.

Just one example, we are thinking of moving to Dorset. We want to be close to the sea, we want the coutnryside, and we want dogs.

Not two days ago a friend phoned me up and asked if I could do some house sitting for him. In Dorset, in a cottage about 100 yards from the sea, looking after two labradors for a week.

This will mean we can explore and see if the county will be a good place to live and one that will make us happy.

Last night I had a little revelation. I realised that I have started living my dream.

And my job is to just keep moving in that direction and have the courage to do the things I know will make me happy.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” - Henry David Thoreau

No reason, I just liked it.

Working out the morals...

Do not be too moral.

You may cheat yourself out of much life.

Aim above morality

Be not simply good, be good for something.

- Henry David Thoreau

After the necessary...

"When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now" - Thoreau

What a wonderful way of putting it. Adventure on life now...

Invisible Costs

The world changes when invisible costs become visible.

Invisible costs drive ethical shopping. Why is this product so cheap? Who got screwed over in the process? Is this another big supermarket driving a small supplier into the ground? What does this cost the earth?

Buying more ethically is taking into account the cost that you don't see on the label.

Likewise, invisible costs with other choices. Jobs, for instance. Sustained stress as a co-factor in cancer, for example.

What about heart disease? If you work long hours you probably don't have enough time to exercise. You might skip meals and then when you get really hungry eat something junky. That's what I do anyway. Thoreau called this "making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day".

If you work long hours, you don't get to spend so much time with the people you love.

Are you a type A personality? By nature, I probably am. Type A personalities* die quicker, on average. And I think my work habits in 2006 have probably encouraged it.

My point is this. If invisible costs were visible to us, we might not bear the cost so readily.

When working, maybe we should be asking about the amount of life required in exchange for doing it, rather than how much we get paid for units of time and levels of expertise.

Sometimes the price is just too high.

Thanks for reading, it means a lot me that you're out there listening.

Rob

*I see a type A personality as a set of behaviours that happen on a consistent basis, not a set of unchangeable characteristics in a person. We can all change.

Earning Money

"This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it , reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once" - Henry David Thoreau

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!

Live the life you've imagined.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

- Henry David Thoreau

Fluster

Yesterday was a bad day at work, so I thought to myself this morning - keep your eyes on the big picture, where you want to go eventually. Because that's what's important - not that the long game should be the only thing but the fact that it gives you a sense of perspective.

Then I found a quote from Henry David Throeau's Walden - the great architect of voluntary simplicity:

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails"

That's really the larger goal in my journey towards a simpler life - simply to live purposefully without being derailed by junk, fluster and ballyhoo.

The fact that there's a lot of it now, I just have to make the best use of it I can. And in this instance, the best use of all that, is to use all of the fluster to get good at ignoring it and not letting it get the bettyer of me.

Simplicity is not climbing in a hole or avoiding difficulties!