Reading my last post, I find that I am truly thankful for the day I wrote those words. Between then and now, I have felt lost at sea.
I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks and I think I have spent the summer dreading it. Not dreading because I'm a year older, but dreading that everything will be the same and nothing in my life will change.
This past three months I have hauled home books from the library - bags full of them. I selected categories for searching the catalog and requested them from The Whole System. Travel. Bread. Beans. Frugal. Sewing. Gardening. And many more subjects as they occurred to me; 20 or 30 books at a time.
What was I looking for? New ideas? Life-changing advice?
I haven't discovered just yet what I expected - and hoped for - by reading what hundreds of others had to say about their lives. I think, at my age, that I am afraid of change as much as I want it. Getting over the fear and plunging into something new is for younger people - at least in what I have read these past months.
I know I'm looking for "new" ideas because as I read some of the books on getting rid of the clutter in life, they all seemed the same: same statistics quoted, same other authors quoted, same methods of working and my comment was often "don't you have any NEW ideas", said with plenty of disgust. Long ago I learned to get rid of things from Don Aslett's book Clutter's Last Stand. I eventually bought (used) another copy as I found, after 10 years or so, that I needed reminding about some things.
The bread and bean books were more helpful. I cringe when I look at the prices on my grocery receipt for things that are what I thought were basic foods - cheese and milk, bread, meat, even vegetables, whether chain store or farmer's market. Not that eating beans or making bread are new ideas - they are a reminder that I once cooked what I wanted to eat and it was truly basic food, thus the beans - cheap, healthy, plenty of variety and bread - to be made a thousand different ways.
The travel category offered some really interesting stories, but when a woman writes about what an adventure it is to be travelling along at the age of 55, I wonder what she will be doing when she's 10 years older, or 20 years older. I've only found one writer who was close to my age writing about travelling. This is something I don't want to give up even though, for various reasons, it's been several years since I was able to get very far from home.
Sewing: nothing new under the sun, just Old Ways becoming popular with the current generation. Ditto with Gardening.
Frugal gets better. I have read a few books that make sense. The original book I had from many years ago about finances - Your Money or Your Life - by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin, had me tracking every penny of spending, putting charts on the wall, and making headway in the world of keeping our heads above water. I see that it has been re-issued as a slightly revised edition. I have put it at the bottom of my reading stack for later. I know it will be the right book for me.
The books I am discovering about frugality are stories of the people who actually made changes in their lives. I think they make more sense than a how-to book, all of which seem to follow the same pattern of "if you've read one, you've read them all" that I found in the clutter books.
I'm nearing the bottom of the stack of books from the last haul and have a few more topics that I want to search for. In the meantime, here are the books that I would recommend to anyone searching for a more simple, thriftier, more interesting life than they have now. They might even make a change for someone.
Here are two for reading:
Now, back to my squishy, green, swivel rocker and the stack of books - - -
