Musings from “Living the Tiny Life”
My new book experiment is my desire to share what I’ve learned about building, making gardens and designing space, and what I think I know about “finding home” and placemaking. These issues have always been so near and dear to my heart since I’m a first generation American with all of my family and ancestors across the ocean in Poland, and I live to “make”.
Nothing lasts in life, especially us and all our peeps, two and four-footed. Therefore what we do between birth and death should be examined a little more closely. I have always wanted to live well despite not coming from a family with money or making a bundle on my own. My intention has always been to create beauty around me and a feeling of abundance while making the dollars I make go as far as possible. I think we can all learn to do that – to do a lot with a little, and enjoy ourselves along the way. I believe that ability is the hallmark of a creative mind – turning nothing into something. I think that’s called making a life. That’s also why I believe that living small and sustainably is such a fun challenge. There is less waste, more money for other things, less cleaning, more time for fun and quality of life, less mowing, more whatever-you-love. And then you can slow down some, enjoy your day more, be with yourself and your extended family more, have time for solitude, peace, your favorite things and just enjoy the air you breathe. It’s possible. It really is possible but it requires a shift – in thinking, in creativity, and in how we spend our money. It also requires us to stop acquisition except when really necessary. It takes evaluating what you want your life to be about – stuff or quality of life experience?
Most of us know that the world is made up of many perspectives and versions of life, influenced by every culture and state of mind, which means a lot of ways of seeing and doing everything – lots of beliefs on this planet. A lot. When we embark on a project, whatever it is – making upholstery slipcovers, growing sprouts or building a spaceship – there are basic components of design we can take advantage of in order to understand HOW to make that project become a reality. Some of it is science, some technology, some art, some just heart – OUR hearts and the desire to make something that’s just purely ours. It doesn’t matter that we will borrow a million ideas from others who came before us and tried to do what we are doing right now. In fact, it’s magic knowing that we can do that – step across time and space and borrow ideas from someone who lived before us and integrate their genius into an important act of our creation at this very moment. Bravo for all of us that we can do that. Gratitude for people writing information down for us to use today, gratitude for libraries, gratitude for the Internet, gratitude for all the fellow intrepid travelers who were diggin’ what we are diggin’ right now – ownership of our creativity and making something from nuttin’. In that moment, we are connecting with something bigger outside ourselves that lives in the big ol’ matrix of the universe, and if we are conscious of this, everything we do can be so deeply inspired by so much more than just our little brains. We can feel the good fortune of how it is we are here now, doing what we’ve chosen to do or what life has deemed necessary now, with the help of great wise beings who did something similar, maybe for the first time, though they too, probably inherited the million perspectives that came before them, right? So we can say hail to life on planet Earth! Hail to all that is and gratitude for that inheritance as we go forth.
Hail to you for having the courage to design and build your new pad and pad landing. Seriously! It’s important that we are shifting the paradigm about making small spaces so that we and the planet can continue to survive and thrive. Small is the new BIG. The hipper you are, the smaller you go – at least in America where we’ve been fat and big for a while now. The pendulum is swinging…glad you are holding on to it.
The happiest people: devote a great amount of time to their family and friends, nurturing and enjoying those relationships; comfortably expressing gratitude for all they have; often the first to offer helping hands to coworkers and passersby; practice optimism; savor life’s pleasures and try to live in the present moment; physical exercise a habit; deeply committed to lifelong goals and ambitions and doing good; cope well with challenges. Sonja Lyubomirsky