The Simple Life

by Lori Dwyer on April 19, 2011 · 40 comments

Someone asked me on Twitter the other day, is this simple life I’m living more conducive to healing, easier on the soul, than suburban living…?

And the answer is yes. Oh my, yes.

It takes some getting used… I’ve been here almost a month and somethings still take me surprise. No Macca’s, no 24 hour anything, and all the shops closed Sunday and Monday… I can get used to that. I am getting used to that. My kids, of course, don’t know the difference.

It’s a fair trade, I think, for this. It’s so quiet here, and people are so friendly. I’m still paranoid, and I still worry about people talking about me… they probably are talking about me. But here, I think, the prominent emotion would be sympathy, not hatred. Empathy, perhaps, rather than blame.

That makes it easier.

Apart from the convenience, and having the people I love dearly close by… there’s not a lot I can miss. My large, two storey house was beautiful, but this little cottage with it’s huge fenced yard is so perfect for us and easy to keep clean and organised and goodness knows we had too much stuff anyway…

I miss my children’s playgroup, and I think, so do they, but we will find another one of those, and soon. One just out of the area, a half hour or so away, that sounds like a perfect medium between my insecurities and my children’s needs.

And my little neighborhood… I loved it so much… but how can I miss it when it turned so sour? How can I miss the short walk to the duck pond, to the playground, when here it’s just a short drive to the beach?

The air here is clean and perfect and the sky, on days like today, is so perfectly blue and huge. There are trees everywhere- that must be why the air here is so gorgeous.

And it’s just the lifestyle. No one here is in a rush, there always seems to be time to go to the beach, to fish, to walk to the river. I remember how much of a rush I was always in,how exhausted I was at the end of every day, having spent the whole day getting not much done… and I wonder what it was I was doing, how it was that i was so busy. I seem to get the same basics done here… and I still find time to sit, to relax.

It’s so good for my soul. It takes so long to ease into it. I remind myself, a hundred times a day, that this knot of anxiety in my chest is unfounded, that right at this second, there is nothing to stress out about.

It’s beautiful here. It’s good for me. It’s good for my soul.

Simple.

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