I wonder how I ended up so hopelessly in debt after such an upbringing. I completely admire my parents ability to live within their means. Now, having paid off our debts (we didn’t walk away) I aim to emulate their skill with money. It’s one reason we didn’t take up the offer to increase our mortgage when we moved house. For the budget we had we could afford a house that easily fulfilled our needs. We didn’t need anything more. We have become so much more interested in doing more with life that to tie ourselves to a bigger financial burden than necessary just doesn’t make sense.

Just recently, some friends of ours have been presented with the same choice. Whether to buy an adequate house and be (almost) mortgage free, or whether to blow the budget, spend to their limit and buy a huge place. They, like us, have two children and have been living to date in a house pretty much the same as ours. It has enough bedrooms, a small garden and plenty of living space. For me it’s a no-brainer.

The question wasn’t such a no-brainer for them. In a few weeks they will be the proud owners of a five bedroom house with a large garden. No denying it’s beautiful but I wonder what price it will come at. They have taken out the biggest mortgage they can afford. They are looking for a cleaner. I have no idea how much it will cost to heat. He will need to work harder to make sure his job stays secure to cover the outgoings. I know everyone is different and that’s what makes life so interesting but it seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. The mortgage was on offer so they took it. The house was lovely so they bought it. I wonder if at any point they stopped and asked themselves what’s important. Is the house so important it’s worth pushing themselves to their financial limit? What could they have done with life, together, by living more within their means? Will the house make them happy? I hope so.

So when I’m encouraged to think about my life and consider how happy I would be about what I’d achieved if I was going to die tomorrow I don’t get a sense of empowerment I get a sense of utter panic. I don’t think about looking back and feeling satisfaction I think about my children and what I’d miss. Even though I know it’s not for real, I don’t think about taking stock and cracking on with things I think about how if I die suddenly I won’t know anything about it and my darker side comes out and asks what the point is. Oh and if I am going to pretend it’s my last day, I have lots of goodbyes to say which will take up quite a lot of time.

Not wanting to sound flippant, I assure you I get that the idea is to see life as it is, as a short, sweet experience which you can either live without thought or do your utmost to squeeze every last ounce of whatever it is you want from it. But for me the motivation comes from the small steps, the little things, the slow, slow, slow enjoyment of time. The “live life as if you might die tomorrow” approach triggers a panicky impatience in me which doesn’t allow things to develop slowly and carefully. Our business has taken 10 years to get to the point where we feel we are starting to achieve really exciting, life changing things yet I don’t feel we have wasted time.

I watched a film recently, not a challenging film, a daft, brain oozing out of your ears film, where a man is given a remote control (yep, you’ve seen it!) to play around with time. He finds himself wishing away great chunks of his life chasing promotions and is left at the end of it an old man who has missed his children growing up and all those little details of life that are so important. I understand that this is it. This is my life and I get one chance and once it’s over it’s over. I’m not sitting around waiting for things to happen for me, I’m making things happen for myself. But I have to be careful that I don’t succumb to the constant feeling that things aren’t happening fast enough. There seem to be two things wrong with this. Firstly I want to live in the present, be present, appreciate what I have and feeling impatient muddies that. Secondly I certainly don’t want to wish my life away. I have two amazing children and I want to enjoy them being children as long as possible and assume I’ll have plenty of tomorrows with them.

Simon and I laugh about his dad’s constant references to time passing. At each milestone event through the year, birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, he always says “well, that’s another year over…”. It feels as if he’s counting down the years to his eventual demise without so much as a backward glance. Much as I appreciate the importance of making the very most of life (and acknowledging the obvious fact of death is a part of that) I plan to live as if I’m going to be around for ever. For me that’s way more exciting than thinking it might all end tomorrow.

The “few things”, apart from the nagging voice in both our heads telling us life isn’t all wrapped up and decided now, were a speech given by JK Rowling and a film starring George Clooney. I know these two are not the people you’d necessarily expect to be an inspiration to major life changes but both touched something in me that brought that ugly head rearing up and slightly flipped my stomach.

JK Rowling was giving the Harvard commencement speech. I’ve never really been a fan of Harry Potter but her speech was simple, honest, down to earth and amazing. The words that hit home were about failure: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you’ve failed by default”. Gulp.

The film was called “Up In the Air” and starred George Clooney. It was about a man who is a loner – works alone, lives alone, no complicated relationships, travels light, keeps a minimally furnished apartment. His main job is firing people but on the side he gives talks and runs workshops called “what’s in your backpack”. These talks exemplify a life free from the clutter of belongings and relationships. He thinks he’s entering into an uncomplicated relationship but finds himself falling in love and starts to question his way of life and his backpack theories.

If I look in my backpack it’s pretty full. It’s full of stuff and people that keep us tied to where we live. Family, friends, routine, house, work. We’ve lived here for two years now and much as we like it it’s an easy place. By easy I mean we don’t have to think much. It’s not challenging. It’s a bit boring if I’m honest. Is that what we want for our girls? For us? Well no, not really. But deciding what we do want involves changing routines we have established, uprooting the girls, maybe learning a new language, the effort of starting again somewhere new. In just two years we have filled a backpack and it’s a heavy load.

I could have a go at lightening my backpack for a bit though. I know I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give something a try. I tell Simon that this big adventure, whatever it turns out to be, is for me like going for a long run. The thought of it is daunting but with a bit of determination (and some gentle nagging, or sometimes some aggressive bullying!) by the end I feel pretty elated.

The two weeks from her death to my birthday gave me lots to think about. Firstly the obvious one about living life to the full. My Grandmother lived so much longer than anyone expected. She had been unwell in her 5o’s and suffered heart problems most of her life. While we all expected my Grandad to outlive her he actually died nearly 20 years ago. As a catholic she had been visited by a priest at her bedside four times and each time until now had woken up and wondered why all her children were gathered around. My parents have been called in the middle of the night to be at her side many times and she has described out of body experiences, white lights and all that. But she kept on going. She found a new companion to share her life with at 80! I guess we never know how long we have and most of the time we take that to mean our life may be cut short, but it can also mean we might just keep on going and going and in some ways that makes it even more vital to make the most of life. Imagine not getting on with it and finding you’d wasted 20 years you didn’t think you were going to have.

Secondly is family – extended family. As a child I spent a lot of time with my cousins, aunts and uncles. Now I only see them at weddings and funerals. My children didn’t come to the funeral but they did come to the bit afterwards and it was the first time they had met most of my extended family. With my Grandmother gone a whole generation has now disappeared. My cousins, my sister and I promised we would meet up once a year. I hope we do.

As my dad and his siblings clear my Grandmother’s flat it is a reminder too about stuff. She had loads of it. Crammed into cupboards and drawers that were all falling apart from the pressure of linens she collected and never used. Thimbles, religious trinkets, soft toys, ornaments. We are all going to choose something to keep. For me, a paperweight. But the rest goes to charity shops. None of it matters after you have gone. What we remember is her. Her elegance and gentleness, her thoughtfulness, her waving goodbye as if for the last time for the past 20 years.

So, on to making the most of time. I am hoping for an uneventful December. I have a series of prints waiting to be finished. My first ones. I’m a little nervous about showing my work to anyone for the first time in a very long time. However they turn out, even with the ink still wet, my Grandmother would have wasted no time in telling everyone and anyone that her Grandaughter is a printmaker.

Time away gave me some space to reflect on life, some head-space with no toddler distractions. I did get distracted by toddlers though – I became really aware of my time with my children and how it is spent. For the most part, we have a very active life, playing with friends, going to the park, making and gluing at home, baking, playgroups, pre-school. It feels as if we have a good balance of time with them – some of the week with me, some with Simon – but I have become aware that I don’t always give them my full attention, 100% of me, and that’s got to change.

So what’s the distraction? Trivial stuff really, cleaning, washing, tidying, some minor task that just needs to be done – sorting some post, calling the dentist. Nothing life or death important, but all the little things that keep us from descending into chaos on a daily basis. There seem to be so many of them! But small though they are, they are getting in the way of me having quality playing time with my kids. Simon seems to be able to put them out of his mind so much more easily and just get on with the playing. Why can’t I? Am I a bit obsessive? Or do I have a lower tolerance for mess? And can I or should I relax and teach myself to let things go?

I have never had one of those minds that lends itself to meditation. I can’t clear my thoughts, put thoughts aside or totally focus on one thing. It isn’t a skill I’ve really worked at because I’ve always assumed I’d really be no good at it. I’m easily distracted (just writing this post I’ve allowed myself to be involved in other things – writing some notes about another project, looking online for something totally unrelated – tile cleaner if you must know, thinking about a phone call I need to make later, yes, later, not even now). What makes my mind jump around so much? Well, if I’m honest I’m guessing it’s the sheer lack of a system, any set way to organise myself and my thoughts and the things I need to do. We got half way there, new filing system, organised office, even wrote a rota for getting the household stuff done. But we didn’t stick to it. And now, with a bit of distance from my normal life, I have seen how chaotic things are.

Needless to say I have a new determination to get things back on track. Getting rid of so much stuff has helped (I sold my bike and guitar last week, this week it’s skis and baby gear). Our house is becoming a more serene, dejunked space. I have put some structure into our week to give me time to get chores done without infringing on play time. I hope it helps. With their lives zooming along I need all the time I can get with them with no distractions. Pretty soon they will be off to school and I don’t want to wish I’d said sod the washing.

I read an article online which discussed the idea that “Simple Living” is a privilege for those who can afford to make that choice (http://www.grist.org/article/chin/). Okay, so it’s a few years old, but I have to admit it was the first time I had thought about it in that way and it made me feel a bit unsure, a bit like it’s a fad that makes light of real poverty. I know we aren’t really striving for simple living strictly, rather a personalised version which is more about balance and making the most of our time and resources. Still, simplicity in terms of what we own and buy, and our relationship to all things commercial is a part of it. In the article, Elizabeth Chin writes about a boy called Davy who has never been to Toys R Us. Other people mistakenly see this as a sign of his protected status yet it is actually a sign of his deprivation. “Simplifying, for the wealthy, has become a task, a burden, an end in itself. (When I say “the wealthy,” I mean nearly every citizen of every wealthy nation.) For so many people in wealthy worlds, simplifying has also become an industry which, ironically, turns out an array of alluring products: toxin-free paint so wholesome it’s known as “milk”; clothing woven from hemp fibres; even the fat, glossy magazine Real Simple…………While the wealthy struggle to shovel out from under their possessions and prepossessions, the poor must struggle on a daily basis to acquire much of anything of value”

So have I conned myself? Is my simple life really complicated and commercial? Is it an affront to people who can’t afford the basics?

I guess there are only so many things I can do about this. Firstly, I can devote some time to thinking about it. Well I have, and this is how it seems to me…

I can’t change who I am – my background, my parents, my education and my career and, of course, I wouldn’t want to. I was born into a family which was devoted to encouraging and supporting me.  I was born into a society which provided education, up to a point, and a family who paid for it to continue. I was self motivated enough to get a good job and work my way up and out into my own business. I can now make a choice about how I live. I could continue to live as I did before, over-consuming and in debt. Or I could decide to take a bit more responsibility and control. I’m struggling to see a way round this. I’m irresponsible if I live to excess but choosing to live more simply is equally fraught with political incorrectness.

Well to start with I don’t buy “milk paint” or “hemp clothes”, and I don’t have a subscription to “Real Simple”. I’m not planning to give up my comfortable house and take my children to live in a cabin to prove a point. What would be the point? The problem is that articles like that make assumptions. They assume that people striving to live simply are wealthy, and while I agree that relatively speaking we are, we are not like the people described by; “The elegant simplicity on display at holiday time in that wealthy neighborhood — a single lighted candle, perhaps, in each of a stately home’s windows — neatly encapsulated the way wealth aspires to spurn its own involvement in hyper-consumption”. We are genuinely trying not to be hyper-consumers and our simple life isn’t trying to cover anything up.

Any lifestyle comes packed with ready made criticism. Even Elizabeth says “Changing the world is a pretty tall order.” She has chosen to write a book about Davy and donate the proceeds to an educational charity. (Charity – there’s a topic for another debate another day…). I guess we could feel endlessly guilty about whether we’re doing enough, but at the end of the day we’re doing something that makes sense to us and hopefully gives us and our kids a full and happy life. I guess it’s a start.

We’ve been running our own business for a decade now and when our children came along we were determined to make sure that they were a part of our whole lives. It’s all too easy to see work as a way to pay for life, rather than a major part of your way of life. It’s a familiar pattern: work pays for leisure time, objects become the things you live for, your holiday becomes a way of escaping from your work life and you try and fit time with your children around the huge immovable entity known as your job.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Getting the equilibrium of your life right, making everything work together and getting more out of every moment comes down to minimalism. Minimalism isn’t about just getting rid of things, minimalism is about the whole. Our story is one of a long journey to achieving the perfect balance. No more work/life balance, no more us/kids balance. Just balance.

You achieve the perfect whole by making sure that every part of it is essential. So the first stop for us is to get rid of everything we don’t need, to look at the stuff we bought when we lived without really thinking. But once we’re left with a few essentials we need to understand them. Does everything in our lives have a purpose? Does it make our lives better? How does it contribute to better life experiences rather than being an end in itself? In short, what is our minimal list?

This brings us back to the beginning. The minimal list isn’t just about stuff. It’s about experiences, work, children, play, learning, creativity, business, technology, health, food and travel. In short, life.

Simon’s post made me look back on what I can only think about as our previous life. I’m not a proponent of re-birth in any spiritual sense but what has happened to us is a kind of re-birth and writing about it is somewhat humiliating. Our life before children, before moving away from London was out of control. We suffered from Affluenza. I wouldn’t describe us as affluent, but we lived with no sense of limit where money was concerned.

We went on 6 holidays in one year, we bought whatever we wanted, ate out more than in. The debt we amassed was huge. There were months we struggled to make the repayments. Some months we paid the debt with more debt. Once we took out a loan to pay a debt and used part of it to go skiing. While away we ate in great restaurants, bought clothes, drank in swanky bars and stayed in a very nice hotel. All the while our debt was growing.

I guess you could say we got lucky. We had a baby and started to feel the fear. The baby wasn’t the only thing keeping us awake at night. We started to look at our situation and it wasn’t easy viewing. For the first time we added up our debt and the amount it was costing us each month. The figures were staggering. I have no idea to this day how we covered it. With baby 2 on the way we decided to move away from London and this decision was inadvertantly our saving. Our flat (our tiny, one bed, 30 square metre flat) had gone up in value by 400%. This was still crazy time, before the crash, and incredibly someone paid up. We used some of the profit to clear our debt. Too easy? Maybe, but the experience itself was the lesson.

Who or what’s to blame? We could point the finger at our parents. Mine in particular have always been faultless with money. Anything they wanted, they saved for. The very thought of going overdrawn would fill them with horror. I could claim a rebellion! We could blame London. All those shops, making us buy stuff!

The simple truth is that we were living for the moment. Stupidly ignoring the consequences. Not imagining a day when we would have to face it and deal with it. Admittedly we did have some great times and the experience has played more than a small part in our new approach to life. Luckily for us we came out of the old life not just not losing everything but gaining insight along the way. It’s not, however, a route to enlightenment I’d recommend.

Saving money and minimising environmental impact are great reasons to embrace simple living but they’re not the real reasons we’re here writing about it. As Naomi said in her previous post, we did have a conversation about finally getting some kind of focus and that’s the point, really. Life is a finite resource. What we’re really thinking about is “focused living”. This strikes home even more when you have small children. All (well, some) of that unfocused bibbling about of less responsible times has to go out of the window in favour of some routine.

It also seems that the notion of “economical” is becoming synonymous with the idea of “cheap”. The recession is tarring everyone out to live a simple, structured life with the same brush. People are probably assuming that if you’re simplifying then you’re just cutting costs. That’s a bit like assuming that all vegetarians are health-obsessed (quite a few of the ones I know really aren’t). We’re not advocating a cheap life. Quite the opposite. What we want to do is think about economics in its real sense. In other words, how can we make the very best use of our resources, whether they’re time, money, attention or skills? There are parallels with design. In fact, it’s a designed lifestyle to some extent. It’s constraint and structure that can really make things work and like with all good design we’re problem-solving – trying to work out exactly how we want to do things.

So, things are coming together. Our children have forced us to be organised with our home life. It seems to make sense to extend that across everything. It becomes a kind of natural progression to get rid of absolutely everything we don’t have a need for, properly organise ourselves and put our creative efforts into more exciting activities than shopping.

There is even more of a necessity for us. We run our own business so, to some extent, life and work can’t truly be separated. We’re going to be kicking the whole, unruly mess into (a beautiful) shape. All of this comes back to the idea of simple design. If we get the underlying structure right then we can make the rest of it better. Spending less on stuff means spending more on experiences. Knowing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing means geting more from every bit of our lives.

For a long time we thought that living abroad is what we wanted but it clearly isn’t quite right otherwise we would surely have done something about it. Having children makes it seem not quite the move right now too. Yet we do want change, adventure, the chance to really experience different places as more than holidaymakers. Sometimes I wish I had taken a gap year all those years ago and traveled the globe backpacking. Now though, I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t want to travel quickly. I don’t want to spend hours in airports, checking in and out, moving on, scratching the surface of a place. I really want to live somewhere long enough to get acquainted. I know that we won’t see the world that way, but we will experience a quality, shortlist of places that really mean something and become an influential part of our lives.

Just recently we’ve been moving towards a feeling of decisiveness. Reducing possessions. Clearing space and minds. Changing how we work. Location independence and simple living are part of it but not quite all of it. What we want is a combination of these – a permanent home which has only minimal stuff which can be packed away easily, a home we can swap, rent out. Work which can happen anywhere for a part of the year. A focused portfolio of portable projects. At least 10 weeks a year living somewhere else alongside stability and a sense of somewhere to return to and recharge ready for the next adventure.

So there it is, temporary location independence alongside a minimal but homely home. Maybe that doesn’t sound like such a major decision, but believe me, it’s taken a lot of thought about a lot more than it might seem. Decisions about work, life, our children, their education, fulfilment, motivation. But now that decision is made life itself feels so much simpler. We know where we’re going (well, not literally, that’s the next decision!) and sort of when – we’re aiming for the first, what shall we call it, extended trip, home away from home, adventure – we’ll come up with a better name – next summer, 2010. That’s the goal.