minimizing distractions

flickr: Hunter Langston

Morgan's smart phone broke this past week, and we were faced with a question: does he NEED a smart phone? We knew that yes, he does need a phone. As a doctor, it's rather an essential. But a smart phone with a data package that costs an extra $30/month plus all the time/distraction a smart phone adds? I wasn't going to ask him not to get a smart phone (that's a pretty big sacrifice to ask when he's had one as long as I've known him). But he admitted immediately that it was a luxury he doesn't need. It will save us money that can go into our debts every month. And possibly the biggest thing is that it will remove that distraction from our lives. I told him I think I may like the no-smart-phone version of him even better, and he agreed that HE may like himself better without the smart phone.

During Lent, we both gave up Facebook. As I looked toward the coming year (this was before minimalism, shopping fasts, etc) and what I wanted for my family, it was obvious to me what stood between me and my daily goals: the distraction of social media and all the time I waste there. So we decided to experiment with simply giving it up. And wow, it was incredibly freeing! I liked myself better. I got so much more done, I sat ignoring my children less. I had more focus. I was a better mother. When Easter came, I actually dreaded the option of getting back on and letting old habits into my life. I'm still trying to figure out what the balance should/can be. Maybe it needs to be a once a day thing... or maybe a once a week thing... or maybe I just need to accept it's a distraction not worth the gains... I don't know. We'll see. :)

With Morgan's smart-phone life being removed, I feel as though God has made our distractions smaller for us. Our children won't see our heads buried in the screen, or feel like they have to compete with technology for our attention. There will be the minor inconveniences of not being able to check the weather just before bed (I guess moms figured out how to dress their kids before smart phones, so I'll be ok), and we won't have constant GPS on trips (people used to look at maps; we can probably do that too!). But I think we're going to gain so much more than we lose! We have been forced to ask ourselves if the gains of technology are worth the cost on relationships and the time we aren't spending talking to our kids about truth and how to navigate life. I'm really excited about this! With less, we get to experience more. Yay for a broken phone!

What to do with DVDs?

Flickr: bobbigmac

I'm not sure what your media center looks like, but ours looks beautiful - on the outside. But open the doors (and they always tend to hang open) and it's purely chaotic. There are DVDs stacked up that were haven't been put away since Christmas. Of '13! Really, you could argue that minimalizing our DVD collection could be extremely easy - just throw away all the DVDs that are sitting in our DVD racks! :P This situation is complicated by a couple factors. 1. I've never in my life been in the habit of putting my media (starting c/ VHS and tapes) away when I'm done. 2. Our kids watch the same cycle of about 5 DVDs day in and day out. Actually, that wasn't very many factors, was it...? It's hard to look at the media center and not get frustrated with the way we keep it, but that hasn't yet led to real changes in our system. 

Since starting to work on minimalizing our lives, I've developed this wonderful vision of ripping all our DVDs, storing them on an external hard drive, and streaming them to the TV. PC World has a good article here that describes how to accomplish this using a nice app called Plex. The problem is that doing with require buying more stuff.We could then get rid of all the cases, and just keep the disks in a nice disk binder. At a minimum I would need to buy another external hard drive, a large disc binder, and some way to splice a tablet to our TV.  I've argued with myself that buy more for the sake of minimalizing might be acceptable, but that argument isn't gaining in my mind. When you couple that with our impending shopping fast, it gets halted completely. 

So what options are left to us? The first step will be to do a minimalization just like we've started in the rest of the house. All the DVDs will come out of their racks - added step of going back in their cases - and then we'll decide which ones are really worth keeping. For the sake of ease we'll move the kids' FWDs (frequently-watched DVDs) up by the TV (in their cases!) and put the remaining disks back into their racks. 

The Minimalists advice for your DVD collection was basically this: get a life and stop watching the same movies all the time. Others have said to embrace Hulu or Netflix instead. I get those thoughts, but we're also trying to spend less time in front of the TV completely. We do really enjoy watching the movies we have and we found that when we had a subscription service we were spending WAY too much time watching it because there was always something new to watch. I think if we focus instead of having a core collection of movies that we actually value enough to keep around and watch repeatedly, we'll had the right things that we'll watch the right amount. 

Any thoughts/ideas that I haven't covered here? What have you done to try to mange your media? I'd love to hear some more suggestions!

Our path to the simplified life

After settling on a destination, the next step on a journey is deciding how you're going to get there. Sometimes the way someone decides to get somewhere defines almost as much of their journey as the destination itself does. Two groups may both tour Ireland and see the same sites, but if one group travels with a large travel agency-organized tour bus they'll have a very different experience than a group that undergoes a wandering backpacking trip.

The path we've chosen involves a combination of several things: homesteading, a small farm, gardening, raising our own animals, food preservation, minimalism. Most of these things are totally new to us, though we're slowly working on integrating them into our lives. We have a 220+ square foot garden, my wife can's quite a bit during the growing seasons, we're raising meat rabbits, and I hunt for our red meat every fall. Still, we're very much urbanites and have a long way to go to getting our family where we hope to go.

Fortunately, it's a path we'll get to travel together.

Our Shopping Fast

So, last night Kyra and I went on a great date. We saw the new Cinderella movie (really, very good!) and had some great conversations. I've been spending a lot of time lately reading through the Becoming Minimalist archives, and I came across this article that talks about the idea of doing a "shopping fast." I also found a trio of interviews here  that wasprobably themost informative part. Quick refresher: a fast is a time of intentionally giving something up for the sake of a spiritual/philosophical time of growth. Think Lent. So this family decided that they were going to fast from shopping for anything but true essentials - food, toiletries, etc - for 1 year. I read it and thought it sounded like a great idea! We've been working on minimalizing recently, and part of what it's made me realize is that we really simply purchase too much stuff. So when I read this idea, I thought it sounded great. What I didn't expect was for Kyra to agree to it immediately! Here are our reasons:

1. We need to minimalize more. Our hope is to move into a small house (less than 400ft2) in the country within the next 2 years. In order for us to physically fit in that space, we need to have fewer things than we currently own! This won't be possible if we keep amassing more and more stuff.

2. We buy too much stuff. We both feel that we shop more for pleasure than for actual need. When we're stressed/tired/bored, sometimes getting something new just seems like an easy pick-me-up.

3. We're carrying consumer debt. It's not a horrible ammount, but until about a year ago we'd never carried a credit card balance for more than 1 month. For the past year we've been "trying" to get our balance paid off, but we've made little/no headway, despite me working a small side-job.

4. We don't want our kids to learn our shopping habits: Our kids are old enough to see stuff and want it. We're experiencing the toy aisle meltdowns. Maybe this is the nuclear option, but we want to be able to start teaching them now that joy doesn't come from things.

Next step: defining the terms of our fast. Hopefully that goes as smoothly :)

The Desination

So I've called this a journey and every journey needs a destination, right? My first thought was that our goal in our journey to simplicity looks something like this picture - rural, pristine, farmhouse, farm animals, the pond where I'm fly fishing to bluegill and crappy in the summer, woods where I'm hunting with my sons (only one of whom has actually been born so far) in the fall. But then I realized that this place isn't our destination at all - it's essentially a big collection of really cool stuff - the pond, animals, the barn, the treestand. Yes, Kyra and I want to raise our family on a small farm, but it's not because we want a farm - it's because we want to give our children and ourselves a different lifestyle and to raise them with the work, discipline, and social freedom that will accompany that lifestyle. We also care about providing them and ourselves with healthy, grass-raised, local food that we've managed ourselves. So yes, I love this picture and the place looks positively perfect, but this isn't what I want. I want healthy kids turning into strong adults. I want young adults who can recognize when society is trying to manipulate them. I want children who are capable of anything that needs to be accomplished and are confident that they can do it. I want teens who know who they are and aren't going to let others convince them that they need to be someone else. I want a family that is connected to nature and the seasons and all the different but unique aspects of every part of the year. This is our destination, and I definitely hope that we can keep from confusing the destination with the path along the way.

Starting the Journey

If we're being honest, my wife, Kyra, and I started this journey quite a while ago, but it's just now that we're actually starting to put the metal to the road. For the past several years we've been shaping our shared vision of the life we want to live, and even more the life we want to provide for our children. I think where we went down a somewhat different path than a lot our peers is when we realized we didn't want our children just to have the 2.0 or 3.0 version life we had, but that we genuinely want to place their childhood in a setting that will equip them in specific ways. We realized thatwe want something different for our children and for ourselves. With that, we're trying to move forward with intentionality.