It took a long time for one of my parents to embrace my choice of an agrarian career. A nice bit of old advice that floats past you when you are least able to use it is "If you do something you love, you'll never have to work a day in your life." That's how I feel about farm labour. I love it. I love the challenge and I love the end result. While reading The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deepe, I found this lovely paragraph about gardening that really resonated with me:
"I think accumulating money, working at ordinary jobs, collecting stamps, cars, marbles, or anything else, and shopping are all sublimations of our basic hunting and gathering drive. But many of us don't find those substitutes fully satisfying. We enjoy more direct hunting and gathering. Hunting, fishing, and gardening-- these are so satisfying that we will do them for "free"-- even when we don't really need the food. In fact, we will often pay a good bit to do them. [...] A big part of what we are after is just the joy that comes from that simple, purposeful, productive labor. We want to work for our food. Part of our essential nature is that we are hunters and gatherers. We want to hunt and gather. We create gardens so as to have a place that is an ideally rewarding place to hunt and gather."
As the snow settles over the garden, I am already longing to return to work next season. Maybe there is something to what Carol Deppe has reasoned.
As regular readers of the blog (and friends who have heard my unprovoked rants) may have guessed, I am opposed to consumerism for the sake of consumerism.
My house does not look like the houses that pop up when you search "minimalism", though. I painted my walls bright colours which repulse people with dark souls, and every wall is covered with a generous amount of rescued or self-made art. All my frames are rescued from bins or relative's basements and it turns out, you can put anything in a frame and it looks like art.
Being anti-consumerist doesn't mean you can't own stuff. Fighting consumerism is a conscious choice; everything in your house has been reflected upon. Every picture, plant pot, bowl, cat, and computer has been invited into my home after much deliberation. I don't go shopping and buy something unless I have a need for it and have already researched alternatives to that thing, or that thing second hand. This probably sounds like a lot of work to people who love going shopping and coming home with an empty bank account but lots of pretty new things to store in the closet and never look at again.
It is easier to buy without thinking than it is to walk through rows of cheap goods and only buy the one thing you need. It's harder to go to the hardware store and find the part to fix whatever is broken than it is just to buy a new thing. Just remember, every time you spend $80 on stuff you didn't need, that's another day you have to keep working that job you hate (if you don't hate your job, awesome!).
I live happy in the knowledge that my actions are in line with my world view. We make too much stuff, throw out too much stuff, and if we could all take one day off work per week we would be less stressed and make more conscientious choices. If life isn't so hectic, you can take time to pause and ask yourself "do I really want this?" (This applies not only to stuff, but relationships and lifestyles!)
If you really want to unwind next weekend after your stressful week at work, instead of shopping, try to turn something you already have but kind of hate into something that is brilliant. Pinterest is full of awesome ideas to turn junk that's sitting in your basement into something artistic and fun. And if you still hate it, no problem! You were going to get rid of it anyway. If you love it, you can feel good that you got a cool new thing without spending any money and without consuming more precious resources and destroying the planet for future generations. Bonus points if you learned a new skill and increased your confidence in your own abilities!
Well done you!
