Posted by Elizabeth

I have a dream.  Not a Martin Luther King kind of dream, or a nighttime vision, but a blurry image that’s still being born.  It’s a dream I’ve been groping around for in the dark for years, blinded by an uncertainty as to how to achieve it.

I want to lead a more simple life.

Maybe it’s a silly dream, a naïve dream, an obvious dream:  who doesn’t want to invite more simplicity into their life?  I’ve made attempts at a simpler life in the recent past, doing the things that I thought would lead me down that path.  Spent less money, cleared the social calendar, watched less TV.  But I still feel like I’m drowning, that my mind and my life are so muddled that I often can’t discern what’s really important.  My desire isn’t to approach simple living in a way that is precious or perfunctory, which is easy to do.  Simplicity, as it turns out, is surprisingly complex, but our impulse is to reduce it down to sound bites, tidy self-help books, and themed magazines with articles that tout 20 Easy Suppers in 20 Minutes!, which doesn’t even begin to dig at the complicated heart of simple living.  My intuition tells me that choosing to live more simply requires an ever-vigilant eye towards finding the beauty in the mundane as an everyday practice.  Like most kinds of meaningful changes in life, simple living isn’t a series of tasks but a way of life.  And it’s a way of life, at least in our culture, that we’re not easily indoctrinated into.  Rather than caring for and tending to the life placed before us, we strive for more in every aspect of our public and private spheres.  We revere the unique, the special, the extraordinary, which is always “out there,” something to be attained and chased after.  I want to stop searching for the good life, and wake up to the good life that is already here, right in front of me – if only I wasn’t blind enough to see it.

I picked up Katrina Kenison’s The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir on a whim, unsure if “a mother’s memoir” had anything to offer a childless woman.  As it turns out, the book had as much to do with one woman’s quest to seek out the simple life as it did with her experiences as a mother of teenage boys.  I found myself swept up in a whirlwind of inspiration, completely captured by her story of physical and spiritual transformation.  I was surprised to discover myself wiping away tears more than once, whispering to myself, This is what I want. As I read the book, I felt a fire lit beneath me, and I realized that what I’m really searching for is a way to make the ordinary extraordinary, for my everyday life to be imbued with meaning and ritual.  And perhaps more importantly, I want to write about the gloriously pedestrian experiences in the same way Kenison does, who makes the simple act of holding a cup of tea at the kitchen window as riveting as anything I’ve ever read.  Her writing captures the essence of simple living:  beautiful, fascinating, and surprisingly complex.

My challenge, of course, is that I’m unsure as to how to begin this journey towards a more simple life, and even more uncertain as to how to write about.  I found myself propped on my sofa Thursday afternoon, nearing the end of the book, ready to spring to action but unsure what my first step should be.  But if I learned anything from Kenison about beginning to live more simply, it is to attend to the ordinary tasks and details of life with a certain spirit of reverence and mindfulness, for it is here where grace resides.  I decided to start with cleaning my laundry room, which might strike you as a particularly unceremonious place to begin a life-altering journey.  But of all the rooms in my house, this one has received the least amount of my attention in the five years I’ve lived here.  It seemed like a fitting place to begin.

The laundry room is a narrow, pokey space, a room I spend as little time in as possible.  When I first moved into the house, after having been a 10-year resident of apartments and other communal living situations, I marveled at the novelty of a room dedicated to managing one’s dirty clothing.  The closest I had ever come to my own laundry room was a flimsy hallway closet in my graduate school apartment, whose doors rattled and shimmied and did an excellent impression of a jumbo jet taking off when the spin cycle was in process.  It didn’t help that the doors had to remain propped open, for to close them meant creating a Florida Everglades environment, hot, humid, and swampy.  Now I had an entire room whose door I could close!

At first I meticulously maintained the space, an altar to domesticity, carefully storing the spindly drying rack as soon as the clothes were dried to make way for the ironing board, whose profile perfectly fit the lanky space.  I marveled that someone had the foresight to thoughtfully install a plug at eye level in the center of the room, perfect for ironing.  As months fed into years, I did what I always do when the everyday no longer provides novelty:  I took the room for granted.  The drying rack stood upright for weeks at a time, the ironing board competing for space.  I haphazardly stuffed the cabinets with cleaning supplies and entirely too many bags of dust rags fashioned from discarded clothing, which emanated a stale, musty odor.  Each time I opened the cabinet door over the washing machine the iron’s licorice cord snaked down into my line of sight, which I carelessly stuffed back into cabinet.  The laundry room became a dumping ground for the things I couldn’t deal with:  drop cloths for unfinished painting projects, pants that needed a button sewn on, light bulbs, candles, phone books, flashlights.  It was easy to close the door and forget it existed.

On Thursday afternoon I cut through layers of dust, sending swirls of gray powder into the air.  I vacuum behind the washer and dryer, remembering how excited we were to receive them as a Christmas gift six years ago, my mother-in-law having snipped a photo of the appliances in two, stuffing one half in my stocking and the other half in Maikael’s.  I discover a shelf whose top layer has been munched upon by a bottle of bleach that spilled long ago.  I realize I never change the light bulbs because they are too far out of reach, and that I can’t be bothered by mopping because the bucket is always filled with old rags.  I don’t replace buttons because the sewing kit is stored somewhere in the bowels of the cabinets, an explosion of needle and thread.  I hate cleaning the house because the room is so chaotic that it’s simply too much trouble to scavenge for cleansers and sponges.  I realize that the state of this laundry room reflects my entire approach to life:  out of sight, out of mind.  Who has time to clean a laundry room when life has so many exciting things to offer just beyond my front door?  It is clear, though, that all these small neglects had added up to one big headache.  If I want to start living simply, I need to start with the small things that require my attention right below my nose.  If I can’t manage what’s already present in my life, how can I even think about doing more, having more, being more, and wanting more?

Standing back to admire my handiwork three hours later, I am overcome by an unusual sense of satisfaction.  I snap open the cabinets to gaze upon the neatly lined shelves.  The floors, freshly mopped, smell pungently of a Christmas tree.  I call Maikael in to appreciate the evenly stacked towels.  It is not the perfection that delights me, but the care and attention that I’ve given to a small corner of my world.  Through my actions, I have made this humble, neglected room worth something.