Thursday, 18 December 2008

• The Gift of Nothing

  I had three pieces of limestone on my desk,
  but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily,
  when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,
  and threw them out the window in disgust.
  ~ Henry David Thoreau, ‘Economy’, Walden

  'September Spending' has such a negative ring to it. However, for Nathan and me in 2007 it sparked a year in which we chose - I believe somewhere in a Philadelphia diner or pub - to live dangerously.

  A sober pact was made between us to, for at least one year, abstain from spending money on anything that we did not absolutely, positively need. I shall be clear. We defined ‘need’ on the most basic level - if we don’t have ‘this’ we will die.

  As of this last September, the year has passed, and what a year it’s been. We had no idea that, just as our pact was expiring, the world would be falling into financial ruin around us.

  All of this had been inspired by an earlier personal pact I had made with myself - the book buying ban. This self-inflicted ban meant no book purchases unless:

  1) the book was a gift for someone else

  2) I had tried to find the book at the library and could not

  3) I had tried to find the book posted online and could not

  4) the book was over 999 pages long, and therefore impossible to read within a library’s timeframe.

  Granted, it was not that extreme of a ban, but there it was - (my only caveat was gift cards). Once I had passed rules one through four, I still had to ask myself if I needed to read the book (for research, etc.) and if the answer was yes, I had to find the cheapest fully intact copy available. God bless those quarter copies on Amazon.com! Further, this ban was (is) only to be lifted upon my first step into a British bookshop, complete with dusty leatherbound editions (who never say ‘flashlight’ instead of ‘torch’ or ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’) and a little old man sitting beneath a brass green-glowing banker’s lamp.

  It was a monetary decision, you see. Stop buying books (let’s face it, I already own nearly a thousand) and start saving money for a little visit across the pond. Then, one can read on a train - that kind of train - where fiction finds its perfect rhythm.

  Philadelphia, the very literary city my husband agreed to take me to upon winning a pair of airline tickets, was the solitary rulebreaker for my book ban. I was allowed some minor book purchases on that trip. And they were lovely old books too. All highly sentimental in the literary/historical sense that is most likely meaningless to anyone but me. But this purchase led us to talking - as most everything does - this time, about Thoreau.

  I have a dreadful copy of Walden, you see. It is a paperback I managed to pick up at a tacky garage sale years ago for - oh, I think for free. The pages are brittle and yellowing. The front cover feels very delicate - much like the cover of The Fellowship of the Ring I managed to finally disintegrate from my sister-in-law’s beloved copy a couple of years ago. It also smells. Not necessarily in that musty old book smell that some of us find addicting.

  But, it’s Walden. How can one, who is reading Walden and loving Walden, and already owns a perfectly useful copy of Walden, say to himself with any degree of rationale that it is time to purchase a new copy of Walden? Even if he is somewhat near that part of the world which inspired Thoreau’s madcap brilliance in the first place? No matter how beautiful, how tempting, how gorgeous a copy is.....well, there you go.

  And then came the subsequent spark.

  And if one loves Walden, and feels himself being changed by it and agreeing with so much of it, how can one continue in the pursuit of purchases which do nothing but inflate or temper the ego....and drag one down into the rich young ruler’s difficult world.....and causes entire global economies to collapse?

  One can’t.

  And so we decided.....to do nothing. Ahem. Nothing meaning not a single purchase of an unnecessary item for ourselves for one year.

  The Rules:

  1) If it is broken, we fix it.

  2) If we can’t, we discover if it can be re-used for something else.

  3) If it’s ugly, we allow God to redefine for us that measure of beauty that we had, long ago, forgotten.

  4) If we can live without it, get rid of it

  It hasn’t been easy - no, no not at all - and I’m sure we’ve been less than perfect in our execution - but it hasn’t been boring either. For one, the challenge in our household to ‘make due’ became a game - and nothing excited us more than finding ways to divert our funds from unnecessary consumerism and into things (we hope) God would have us use His money for. Because, after all, it is His money. Always has been.

  We have felt ourselves, in fact, so brutally altered that we have decided to continue beyond our year’s end and into the far future. While we are allowing ourselves to spend on a few things of non-essential value, the rules have pretty much remained. We use what we have. We shop in our own closets and cabinets. When we can’t find what we need, we buy secondhand first, new things only as a last resort. We worry less about the impressions we’re making on those who have, and more about impressing generosity upon those who have not. I know that I personally have gone from being a person of excess to someone who absolutely refuses to get rid of her toaster, and who cried when her 60 year old vacuum finally needed replacing. It was a long distance run for me. My husband, who used to be a very spontaneous BIG spender, now nearly breaks into hives when he purchases anything that costs more than 10.00. Unless it’s pot roast. And this year, rather than splitting up during the hectic December season and shopping for each other, we adopted a family and shopped for them together.

  In short, the year has passed, but the lessons have stayed with us. We have changed.

  We are obstinate to do no work on Sundays, unless it is charitable or absolutely necessary. We love each other instead of just talking about it. We are trying to love our neighbors as best we can, though we humbly admit it isn’t always easy. We imagine that loving us can’t be easy for them either.

  At the end of this Simplicity, Simplicity, Simpicity! we find ourselves, happily, free. We find ourselves awake. We find ourselves alive.

  A year of poverty - a year at the lake - or perhaps we should rephrase - a year cleaning out that inner cesspool which too often stagnates within the human heart - has proved to be, perhaps, the best year we’ve had together yet.

  This year, this pact, was a gift. The gift of nothing. And in the end, it was the best Something we had received in a long, long time. We highly recommend it to anyone still trying to find that Perfect Gift.

  Ah yes, and, in case anyone wonders, that copy of Walden still lies in Philadelphia..... though *sigh* it was such a beautiful copy.

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