The Good Life I Was Already Living

By S.M.R. Saia
Published on September 2, 2009
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We’ve recently become a one-income family, an unexpected event that fortunately has not left us struggling, but it has given us some pause. The only real casualty here is that we can’t spend money thoughtlessly anymore, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, it’s surprised me how much I’ve come to think of it as a good thing, because this change in our circumstances has forced me to be the one thing that I’ve felt unable to be for most of my adult life – where I am.

My husband and I have spent most of our 15 years together living in and for the future: we figured we’d be happy when we got out of debt, when we got a bigger apartment, when we were able to buy a house, when we could move into a bigger house and onto a bigger piece of property … the list is endless, and the energy required to sustain this kind of thinking is exhausting. So, it came as something of a relief to realize that we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Ironically, the change has enabled and encouraged us to throw our energy in directions we wanted to head in anyway. A little over a year ago we started a long-term food storage program, and I began gardening. Our first spring’s effort was small, but satisfying. Fall was small and even more satisfying, and this spring we stepped up production.

Our interests weren’t originally about saving money. They were more motivated by an interest in emergency preparedness, concern about the quality of the food we were eating, and an evolving interest in self-sufficiency. But when sudden job loss caught us temporarily broke between paychecks, we found that we had unwittingly prepared ourselves for it. Instead of being in a panic, I found myself thinking, gosh, we’re actually okay. We don’t really need anything. And this was a sudden seismic shift. In our previous, two-income life, I was in a grocery store almost every day. If we ran out of something, well, we were out of it, which implied it ought to be here, which meant I couldn’t relax until I went and got it. I mean, we were out of it! It was a problem!

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