Expert Opinion

I don't need an expert to tell me that life is harder now (as opposed to then?), but I read the article anyway.

The first paragraph struck me for a couple of reasons:

1. It uses the word "splurging" in the first paragraph. Since this "blah" is titled "Splashes and Splurges"--I'm all for the mention, even though I'm trying to splurge in different ways these days (ways that either save money or avoid spending it altogether).

2. It pointed out that Americans are packing the shopping malls and crowding restaurants but spending less. I've been guilty of the former more so than the latter. In fact, there was a point not too long ago when a weekend wasn't a weekend if I didn't make a "quick trip" to the mall, you know, just to see if there were any good sales but mostly just to get out of the house.

Eventually, I started thinking good and hard about why getting out of the house was so important to me. Once I got to the bottom of that, I could start taking steps to make life a little...easier.

I think the rest of the article misses this point. It goes on to talk about how Americans are actually spending less (but being squeezed more). It focuses entirely on the financial aspects of a harder life, but doesn't all good research, common sense, and The Beatles tell us that money can't buy us love? Or internal ease? Wasn't the writer interested in why people are lapping the mall or slurping their Starbucks weekend after weekend to begin with? Especially since they aren't spending money?

For me, life felt harder, or feels harder, because I was making it harder. Rather than stay at home, cook the gourmet meal I had aspirations to cook when I bought all of those groceries earlier in the week, or go through my closet to weed out clothes I no longer wore, organize pictures that were stacked in nearly every corner of my house, or finally organize that drawer that collected everything without a home and the one next to it that was home to its overflow, I "went out":

• to the mall (to buy more things to add to the drawer),
  
• to the bookstore (to buy books on how to get rid of things), or
  
• to the coffee shop (to write about how I was going to spend more time at home getting rid of things).

Before I knew it, the weekend was over and I hadn't accomplished a single thing. I tortured myself for the next week, vowing to stay home and get straightened out. It never happened. I continued to feel the stress, the guilt, the noise of a cluttered mind caused by a disorder called Avoidance.

Until I just picked one thing and tackled it. I resisted the urge to "go out" just one time and while it was hard it definitely got easier.

My closets are still not color coded and my pantry is still not alphabetized. But I am down to one (okay, maybe two) trips to the grocery store each week (thanks to my FeedMe Planner), am spending lots more time actually reading books and articles rather than just collecting them, writing more rather than whining about not writing at all, and getting down in the dirt with my daughter.

Life is hard, there is no question about it. But it can also be so satisfying.

Today's Splurge:

While it seems completely contradictory (maybe even hypocritical) to highlight anything that involves money here, I'm going to anyway--because if there is one thing I love more than words, it's paper to write them on. Check out this great paper with pretty Japanese prints from Paper Source. I haven't bought any of it yet (mostly because I'm having such a hard time deciding) but just looking at it makes me want to "do something creative today."